Food & water tracking

The food & water tracker is a daily diary of what you eat and drink, scored live against the targets you set. It is handy for protecting protein and staying hydrated while appetite is suppressed.

Step 1: Set your targets

1. Go to Settings → Nutrition targets (or the Targets link on the Food & water page).
2. Use the calorie calculator at the top if you would like a starting number. It estimates your resting burn from your height, age, sex and weight, scales it by your activity level, and takes off a deficit for the weekly loss you are aiming at. Press Use this target to drop it into the calorie field. Your sex, height (in feet and inches) and birth year are the same ones on your profile, so filling them in here saves them there too.
3. Set your macro split (protein / carbs / fat), an optional fiber goal, and a water goal.
4. Save. Your daily log now shows a progress bar toward each goal.

Macros can be entered either way round and stay in step: type a percentage and the grams are worked out from your calorie target, or type a gram target and the percentage updates to match. The preset buttons (Balanced, High-protein, Low-carb, Keto) fill both at once. Change your calorie target and the grams re-split themselves, keeping the percentages you chose. Everything you pick here is remembered, including your activity level and weekly goal, so you never have to set it up twice.

Your day is summarised at the top of the page: one dial for calories, then a bar for each macro. Protein and fiber are treated as floors, targets you are trying to reach, so passing one reads as “target hit” rather than as going over. Calories, carbs and fat are ceilings you are staying under, so those show how much you have left. Water has its own card further down the page.

Count net carbs? Turn on the Net carbs switch under the macro bars and carbs are shown as carbs minus fiber everywhere on the page: the carbs bar, each item in your diary and the macro split. Your carb target is then measured against net carbs, so set it on the targets page to the net carb number you are aiming for. The switch stays the way you left it every time you come back, and nothing you logged is changed by it.

Targets that scale as you lose

A lighter body burns fewer calories, so a target that was right in January is too generous by the time you have lost 20 lb. Rather than leave you to notice, we watch for it. When a weigh-in moves your numbers enough to be worth interrupting you for (roughly every 8 lb, measured on the calorie target rather than on raw pounds, so your own height, age and activity level all count) we ask: “Would you like to re-calculate your TDEE?” Say yes and your calories are updated and your macro grams rebuilt from your saved split. Say Not now and we stay quiet until it drifts again. The same offer waits for you on the Food & water page if you miss the prompt.

Weight naturally drifts up and down with water, salt and food, so none of this runs off a single reading. We use a smoothed trend weight drawn through your recent weigh-ins, and an isolated odd day (a duff scale reading, a heavy morning) is discarded before it is worked out, so it cannot move your target in either direction. The trend tracks the scale rather than lagging behind it, which is the point: a real loss shows up straight away instead of a fortnight later.

Your fiber and water goals are yours alone and are never changed for you. The calculator is always on the targets page too, so Use this target followed by Save targets gives you a fresh number whenever you want one, prompt or no prompt.

If you would rather never be asked, targets can keep themselves up to date on their own. That is a separate add-on: see Barcode scanning & self-adjusting targets.

Step 2: Log food

1. Open Food & water and choose to add an item to today.
2. Search for the food the way you would say it: chicken breast, white rice, 2 eggs, even chipotle veggie bowl. Results appear as you type.
3. Pick the portion. Most foods now offer the ways people actually eat them, such as 1 slice, 1 medium apple or 1 cup, cooked, with grams and ounces still there if you weigh what you eat. Calories and macros scale to whatever you pick. These portions come from the nutrition database itself; for a food that publishes none, a sensible one is worked out for you, and the nutrition always stays the database's.
4. Save. It’s added to today’s totals.

Logged the wrong amount or meal? Each item in the day’s list has an Edit button: reopen it to change the portion, unit or meal (the totals recalculate), or the × to remove it.

If nothing matches, or nothing matches well, the page says so and offers to let you describe it instead, carrying over whatever you typed. That is the AI meal logger, and it is the better tool for a pub meal or a takeaway that no database has ever heard of.

How search finds your food

Search looks through everyday foods, hundreds of thousands of packaged products and thousands of restaurant menu items at once, in one list. It looks for foods that are what you asked for, not just ones that share a word with it: a search for buffalo wings finds wings, not buffalo-wing chips or wing sauce, and a search for a soft boiled egg finds eggs, not a ramen kit with an egg on top.

• Name a restaurant or a brand and its own items come first: applebee’s wings, taco bell beef taco, a bag of doritos. If it has nothing that matches, the next results are labeled, for example Not from Applebee’s, so you always know what you are looking at.
• Restaurant items use the nutrition the chain published, marked Restaurant with the year it was published when we know it. Menus change, so if a number looks off for what you ordered, the chain’s own nutrition guide is the final word. For a meal from somewhere no database has heard of, describe it instead.
• One row per food. A food that comes several ways shows once, with its everyday version first and the other ways underneath as small buttons (hard-boiled, scrambled, fried). A product shows its flavor in its name and its sizes, or the brands that make it, as the buttons.
• Your own foods and meals are marked Yours, and the foods you log often rise to the top of your results. Over time, so do the foods members log most.
• Typos are forgiven. brocoli finds broccoli and spagetti finds spaghetti.
• Amounts are read as amounts. Search for 2 eggs and the amount box already says 2; words like a bag of or a slice of are never mistaken for the food.
• Fixing a number. Open Edit or add nutrition under the label. The boxes show the amount you picked, the same figures as the label, so type what the packet says for that amount. Change the amount afterwards and your correction scales with it. Editing the entry later opens it with the amount and the numbers you logged.

Quick add: meals, favorites and what you log most

The add-food screen lists your saved meals, your favorites and the foods you log most often, all for one-tap logging. The recent list is ordered by what you actually eat rather than by what you happened to log last, so the breakfast you have every day stays at the front instead of being pushed off by one unusual dinner. Tap the ★ star on any food, in the search results or the quick-add lists, to add it to favorites. Picking a quick-add item jumps to the amount step with the same amount you logged last time already filled in.

Log several foods at once

1. On the Add food page, tap Multi-select, on the right beside the heading of your meals, favorites or recent foods (or beside the search box if you have none yet).
2. Tap foods to pick them: your meals, favorites and recent foods, anything in your search results, or a product you scan. Search again as often as you like and your picks are kept. A picked food shows a tick; tap it again to unpick it.
3. Tap Review & log in the bar at the bottom. Each food starts at the amount you logged last time (or one portion if it is new to you). Change any amount or unit, choose the meal, and check the total.
4. Tap Log all. Everything goes into your diary in one go.

You can pick up to 30 foods at a time. To fix a food's nutrition numbers, log that one on its own, where Edit or add nutrition is available. Eat the same group of foods often? Save them as a meal and they become one tap.

Custom & frequent foods

Save foods you eat often to your own catalog (Settings → My exercises/foods area, or the Foods page) so they’re one tap next time. You can also create a fully custom food when something isn’t in the databases.

Water

Log water in your preferred unit (set it once and it sticks). Quick-add buttons make logging a glass or bottle instant; remove an entry if you tap one by mistake.

Coffee, tea and soda

Drinks other than water belong in your food diary, not on the water card, because they carry calories and the water card doesn’t. Log a latte or a cola the same way you log anything else, and it counts against your calorie and macro targets properly.

Their fluid can still count toward your water. Tick Count drinks from my food diary toward water on the targets page and the liquid in anything you log as a drink is added to the day, so you never enter the same coffee twice. The water card then shows the split: what you logged there, and what came from drinks.

• We work the amount out from the serving: a “330 ml” or “12 fl oz” serving is read straight off, and a drink measured by weight is counted as the same number of millilitres (for drinks the two are within a percent or two of each other).
• Only the liquid counts. A soup or a yogurt is food, not a drink, and contributes nothing.
• Any food has a Fluid per serving box. Leave it blank to let us work it out, set your own figure, or enter 0 so that food never counts toward water.
• Nothing is added to your water list as a separate entry, so editing the drink or removing it from your diary keeps the day’s total right on its own.

The setting is off until you turn it on, and it applies to your whole history, so expect past days to go up when you switch it on. Turn it back off and they go straight back.