"Engineers love to quantify things, and calorie counting lends itself to quantifying, " says Pressflip.com co-founder Ted Dziuba, who wrote a hilarious riff on weight loss for his personal blog.

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She bought a calorie-counting book on the way home and started reading food labels.

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And there are dozens upon dozens of calorie-counting, food-monitoring and menu-tracking apps to aid the diet-conscious.

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The name alone is enough to raise eyebrows, but wait until you see the special features: a biorhythm calculator, a fatness function that calculates a user's height-to-weight ratio, a calendar for keeping track of your menstrual cycle and a calorie-counting function.

ECONOMIST: Mobile telephones