Core Concepts¶

A quick guide to the building blocks you'll encounter throughout the app.

Food¶

A food is any item you can log — an apple, a chicken breast, a protein bar, a tablespoon of olive oil. Each food has a set of nutritional values: calories, protein, fat, carbs, and fiber.

Foods come from three places:

Your Foods — Things you've created, edited, or previously logged. These appear with a gray background in search and always show up first. Think of this as your personal pantry.
Standard Foods (USDA) — A large, built-in library of common foods with high-quality nutritional data from the USDA. Blue backgrounds in search indicate gold-standard data; red backgrounds indicate older entries. Think of this as a reference cookbook that came with the app.
Open Food Facts — A massive online database of packaged products from around the world. You search it by tapping the globe icon. Think of this as the nutrition label for everything at the supermarket.

Serving¶

A serving is a named portion size with a gram weight. For example, an apple might have servings like "1 medium" (182g) and "1 cup sliced" (110g). A food can have as many serving definitions as you like.

Good serving definitions make logging faster — instead of remembering weights, you just pick "1 medium" from a dropdown.

Quantity¶

The number of servings you had. If you ate one and a half medium apples, your quantity is 1.5 with the serving set to "1 medium."

Portion¶

A portion is what actually gets recorded in your log: a specific food, at a specific serving size, in a specific quantity, on a specific date and time. It's the combination of all the above — "1.5 medium apples, logged at lunch on Tuesday."

Where Does Food Data Come From?¶

When you search for something, the app checks three sources in order:

Your Foods — fast, local, always available
Standard Foods — fast, local, always available
Open Food Facts — requires internet, triggered by tapping the globe

The color coding in search results tells you which source each result came from, so you always know what you're looking at.

Under the Hood: How Your History Stays Accurate

One of the most important things the app does behind the scenes is protect your past logs.

The short version: When you log a food, the app takes a snapshot of its nutritional data at that moment. Even if you later update the food's calories or macros, your past logs still reflect what you actually ate.

How it works: If you change a food's name or emoji, the update applies everywhere instantly — that's a cosmetic change. But if you change the nutritional values (calories, protein, fat, carbs, or fiber), the app creates a new version of the food. Future logs use the new version; past logs keep the old one. You never have to worry about an edit rewriting your history.

One thing to know about recipes: If you update the macros of a food that's used as an ingredient in a recipe, the recipe continues using the old version of that ingredient until you manually edit the recipe and swap in the updated food. This is intentional — it keeps your recipe stable until you decide to change it.