This Manila lawyer compiles restaurants’ calorie info for you
Athletes, lifters, and people who’ve had to watch what they’re eating know this pain point all too well: It is incredibly hard to be on a diet in the Philippines if you’re not preparing your own food. And there are many reasons a dieter might not be able to prepare their own food at home. But I won’t get into those right now.
You gotta do what you gotta do. Sometimes you have to rely on meal prep delivery services that do the calorie counting for you, or buy your food elsewhere and eat less of it by using the eye test.
Something tailor-fit for our needs
I have done both, and both have their own challenges. Every time I’ve had to diet, I mostly default to just knowing what I know about fast food and eating less of it. When I religiously tracked and logged my calories, I would rely on apps like MyFitnessPal, which might have nutritional information on hand.
I found that they would have entries for popular fast food chains and the like, but they would be based on other countries, so you never really can get a good handle on how many calories you’re putting in if you don’t cook your own food or buy products with complete info on the packaging.
Which is why accounts like @sukatsquad on Instagram were a godsend. They would take popular fast food items and approximate the macros and calories based on the ingredients. But this took time, and it wouldn’t cover enough. Eventually, @sukatsquad’s updates petered out, and they stopped doing that service entirely. (Their last post was June 2025.)
Born from a mandated ordinance
Now, someone new has taken their place: @anongcaloriesnito, who is also on Instagram. With the mandate of the Quezon City (QC) local government unit (LGU) requiring big restaurant chains to publish calorie information—and other LGUs slowly following suit—this account goes around the Metro compiling the different calorie counts that have been displayed, all for diners and dieters to make better-informed choices when they eat out.
The account @anongcaloriesnito was directly born from the QC ordinance, and if his records aren’t yet complete, I figure pretty soon it will be. The account compiles items from all the fast food joints you go to, convenience stores serving food, midrange restaurants, milk tea shops, and even some supermarket items.
After a few months, it’s become pretty comprehensive, and if you’re not following yet, you’re missing out—I find it a very useful tool because the rest of the Metro still hasn’t caught up to the need to publish this info.
Bridging information and nutrition gap
The man behind the account is Biboy Renes, a lawyer who, by his own admission, is “trying his hardest to stay healthy.”
He tells me his story: During and after the pandemic, his weight ballooned to 275 lbs., and the alarm was raised when his bulk was getting in the way of his passion for traveling.
“Because I love to travel, it became a massive wake-up call when my weight started posing physical limitations, like struggling to fit into an airplane seatbelt, not being allowed on a roller coaster at Universal Studios Japan, or simply not having the stamina to walk around Hong Kong Disneyland,” Renes says. “I knew I needed to change, so I started my fitness journey last May 2025.”
Now, he lifts weights, runs, and tries to hit at least 15,000 steps a day—plus he is on a general calorie deficit, making sure he burns more than he eats. Now that’s dedication to fitness.
And like me, he also noticed calorie counts appearing on restaurant menus around QC because of the aforementioned ordinance—and was severely disappointed to find that everywhere else still didn’t have them. Seeing this as an “information gap,” Renes decided to start @anongcaloriesnito so that the rest of us could be informed.
“We are incredibly lucky in QC to have access to these calorie counts, but that transparency shouldn’t be gated by city borders,” he says. “I want to make such information readily accessible to anyone trying to track what they eat. If I can help even just one person make a more informed food choice for their day, then the page has done its job.”
Not a dietitian or an expert—just an investigator
I brought up @sukatsquad’s work, and Renes says he’s a big fan—but since he’s no dietitian or expert on food, he won’t aim to do any of the precise measuring that that account did. He’s happy to just share and broadcast the calorie counts that establishments are displaying.
“At the moment, my focus is on aggregating and sharing officially disclosed data that is otherwise difficult for the average consumer, especially those outside QC, to find,” Renes says. “However, I’ve recently started expanding into sharing other aspects of my journey, such as cooking my own meals and highlighting better dining-out alternatives, all while staying firmly within the ambit of mindful eating.”
But like a good investigator, Renes doesn’t just stop at what the restaurants give us. He does further research and looks up other resources, including artificial intelligence (AI) tools that try to estimate macros and calories. It’s necessary for smaller establishments such as carinderias, as the QC ordinance is currently only applicable to bigger chains.
“Use them as a baseline”
Ultimately, though, Renes’s most important lesson to us is this: The published calorie counts help, but it’s also worth remembering not to believe everything they tell us, because not every dish is prepared the exact same way.
Or worse, establishments could still lie just to fulfill the requirement, which he has discovered the hard way.
“Use them as a baseline, but not as [the] absolute truth,” he cautions. “I sometimes spot establishments with obviously wrong or dubious calorie counts based on the intuition I’ve developed from a year of tracking my own meals. When something looks off, I’ll manually adjust the estimate based on other resources before I log it on my calorie tracker.”
And for all the researching, documenting, and logging he’s done, Renes shares the best low-cal treat you can give yourself: frozen yogurt.
“I used to assume it was a total calorie bomb, but I was happy to find out that plain frozen yogurt averages only about 1 calorie per gram depending on the brand. It’s a cool, relatively low-calorie way to satisfy a sweet craving. I take it plain, or with just fresh fruit toppings,” he reveals.
