Custom meals & repeating foods

Save the foods you always eat together, log them in one tap, and set them to repeat.

Most people eat the same handful of things most mornings. A meal is those things saved together under one name, so logging the lot is one tap instead of five.

Build a meal

  1. Open My meals and choose New meal.
  2. Give it a name you will recognise at seven in the morning. “Usual breakfast” beats “Meal 1”.
  3. Search for each food and pick it to add one serving.
  4. Set the real amount on each row. The running total at the bottom is exactly what will be logged.

A meal is built out of the same foods your diary is, so anything you can log you can put in a meal: your own foods, or anything from the food databases.

Packet that will not come up in a search? Tap Scan a barcode under the search box and point your camera at it, photograph the barcode, or type the digits. A found product goes straight into the meal, and the scanner stays open so you can do the next packet. Scanning is part of the barcode scanning add-on.

Fix an item’s numbers

Tap Edit on any item in a meal to change its name, or anything on its label: calories, protein, carbs, fat, fiber, sugar, saturated fat and sodium, plus every vitamin, mineral and the rest of the full label.

  • The numbers are for the amount that item has in the meal, the same ones its row shows. What you type is what you see.
  • Change the amount afterwards and your corrected numbers scale with it. They are never swapped back for the database’s.
  • Leave a box empty if the label doesn’t give it.

Only that item in that meal changes. The food it came from stays as it is everywhere else, and every day you already logged the meal on stays exactly as it was.

Or make one out of a day you already logged

Usually you only realise a plate is “the usual” after you have eaten it a few times, by which point it is already in your diary. So you can build a meal out of what is there rather than typing it in again.

  • Next to Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner or Snacks, tap Save as meal to take everything in that part of the day. Burger, fries and a beer become one saved “Dinner”.
  • Or tap Select items at the top of the day and tick exactly the ones you want, from as many parts of the day as you like.

Either way you get to name it first, and you can untick anything you would rather leave out. The amounts saved are the ones you actually ate, including any corrections you made when you logged them.

Saving a meal this way leaves your diary exactly as it is. If you would also like those items tidied into one row for that day, tick Combine them in this day’s log too before saving.

Log it

  • From My meals, pick the group and tap Log today.
  • From Add food, your meals sit at the top under My meals, ready to tap.
  • By searching for it by name, like any other food.

It lands in your diary as a single row with everything in it listed underneath, so a 620 cal line says why. If you would rather each food got its own row, change it in Meal settings.

Repeat it

Food you eat on the same days every week can log itself. Open the menu on anything in your diary, or on one of your meals, choose Repeat, then pick the amount, the group it goes in, an optional time of day, and the days of the week.

  • It appears in your diary from then on, on the days you picked.
  • If you do not open the app for a while, the last couple of days are filled in and no further, so a week away never leaves you deleting meals you did not eat.
  • Repeating lists everything you have set up. Pause one for a while, or stop it for good.
  • Stopping a repeat leaves every day it already filled in exactly as it is. It is food you ate, not a setting.

Individual foods can repeat too, not just meals. The morning coffee, the evening vitamin: set it once and stop thinking about it.

Changing one you already logged

Every row in your diary has a menu with everything you can do to it.

  • Explode meal breaks it back into separate foods on the same day, so you can delete the one thing you skipped.
  • Adjust meal changes how much of each food was in it, this once. Your saved meal and every other day you logged it on are untouched.
  • Copy to today, or Copy to put it on any day and in any group.
  • Show nutrition summary gives the full breakdown of that one row.
  • Edit a copy of food makes a food from a shared database yours, so you can correct it without changing it for everybody else.

A meal you logged in March keeps March’s version of itself. Rebuilding the meal later, or deleting it altogether, never rewrites a day you already recorded.

Meal settings

  • Log a meal as one item you can split later, or as separate foods straight away.
  • Show or hide the list of what is in a meal underneath its row.
  • Put the time of day on what you log, which is also what lets a repeat carry its own time.

These guides are for using the app. They’re not medical advice: the medication-level estimates in particular are a model for personal tracking only. Talk to your clinician about your treatment.