Portion Control Made Easy with New AR Menu App

The most important part of your fitness routine is your diet. While exercise is a key building block to earning the body that you want, what you eat is the foundation all of your hard work is built on. And nothing throws off a carefully-managed meal prep plan than eating out. Restaurants are notorious for offering dishes that can make up the majority of your daily recommended calories. Practicing portion control can alleviate this problem, but what happens when you don’t know exactly what you’re getting? A description in a menu can only tell you so much. With a new app called KabaQ, we could see exactly what we’re getting without having to order it.

What You See is What You Get

In the 1960s, a dinner plate measured 9 inches in diameter on average. Today, the average is closer to 11 or 12 inches. A good number of us are raised to clear our plates, but bigger plates means there are more calories to consume. Because we wouldn’t want the food to go to waste, we eat it all. Since more food can be piled onto bigger plates, we just end up eating more. Thanks to the combination of these circumstances, we often underestimate just how much we’re eating. This is where KabaQ can help us be more mindful of portion sizes and control how much we eat.

KabaQ utilizes scanning technology to create 3D models of a restaurant’s entire menu. The app allows restaurant guests to view these models through a smart device, either their own or one belonging to the venue. Guests can choose a dish at their leisure, which is then displayed to scale on the guest’s table with a 360 degree view all around. This not only ensures that the guest will know exactly what they’re getting, but also how much food they’re going to get. It will encourage restaurant-goers to either look for more manageable options, or to ask for a to-go box right at the outset of the meal. This isn’t the only way KabaQ will be helping the diet-conscious consumer.

Information at a Glance

Unless you’ve already made a habit of making entries in a calorie notebook, then you might not be able to make educated guesses about your calorie intake from meal to meal. For the rest of us, it can be surprising just how many calories our food provides us with these days. KabaQ takes advantage of its technology and doesn’t limit itself to being just a 3D gallery.

Knowing that the slice of cake is going to be about the size of your fist is a good way to eyeball your portion size, but portion control needs more than that to be effective. How many calories will the meal be? What does it do for you in terms of your macronutrients? In this regard, KabaQ helps trees as much as waistlines. There are dedicated fields within the app where the food vendor can enter a particular dish’s nutritional information. On top of that, the vendor will also be able to enter in any allergens the food may have. This, combined with the visual showcase the app already provides, encourages restaurant guests to have a more mindful in-restaurant experience.

Portion Control and More Healthy Choices

Alper Guler, the man behind KabaQ, is contributing to the fitness world beyond helping restaurant patrons practice good portion control. Obesity is undeniably a prevalent issue in America, and Guler is working to hit it where it starts: childhood. He is working on a Kickstarter with the Eradicate Childhood Obesity Foundation. Their goal is to launch an app called SugAR Poke, which would display the total teaspoons of added sugar for consumer products. All the shopper would have to do is hold their smart device up to the product in question and an AR display will show the measurement for the entire product as opposed to serving size. The app is in beta right now. It only contains the information for a number of salad dressings commonly sold in American supermarkets. If the Kickstarter is successful, then SugAR Poke will expand to hold the information for the entire processed food section.

KabaQ is currently working with David Burke’s Tavern62, Rue B, and Dutch Boy Burger. These are all restaurants located in New York. Guler hopes that more restaurants will turn to KabaQ for its client-serving applications.