Your food diary

Your food diary is a personal, day-by-day log of what you actually ate, with calories and macros tallied against your targets. It works whether or not you have a nutrition plan - use it on its own, or alongside one.

Pick a day

The day strip at the top lets you move between days. A day that is behind you shows how far it landed from your target - +340 kcal, −140 kcal - in green when you hit it, orange when you were a little off and red when you were well off. Hitting it means landing within 10% of your target, up to 200 kcal either way; the next 200 kcal is orange, and anything past that is red. Today is still running, so it reads in words instead: Under while there is room left, On target once you are in range, and Over if you go past it - and it only takes on a color once you go over. Days with nothing logged simply show No meals.

Your week

Under the day's card, the week bars show the seven days of the current week, Monday to Sunday. Each bar is one day, coloured the same way the day strip colours its badge: green when the day landed on target, orange when it was a little off, red when it was well off. Today is turquoise while it is still running - the same colour the day strip gives the day you are on - and takes on orange or red only if you go over, because being under your target at lunchtime is a day in progress, not a miss; and a day you did not log stays a small grey stub rather than counting as a failure. Tap a bar to see that day's calories; tap it again, or anywhere else on the card, to put it away.

Under the bars the card states how the week is going and by how much, like −598 kcal. It measures what you have eaten so far against the goals of the days that have already started - so on Tuesday you are compared with two days' worth, 4 000 kcal on a 2 000 kcal daily goal. A week is judged more loosely than a day: within 5% of that running goal, up to 700 kcal either way, counts as being in range; roughly another 5% past that reads as a little off, and anything beyond it as well off. That is deliberate - seven days of small honest misses should not add up to a bad week.

Today counts in full, in both directions. The card will therefore read low in the morning and climb back as you eat, which is the honest answer to how your week is going at 9am. On the first day of the week it stays quiet altogether: with no finished day behind it there is nothing to compare against, so you get the bars and the total and no verdict. Days you never logged drop out of the comparison entirely - the same call their grey bars already make.

The card always shows the week you are in, even when you scroll the day strip back to look at an earlier day.

Added and planned

The meal list has two tabs. Added is what you actually logged, most recent meal at the top. Planned is what your nutrition plan schedules for the day - open one to review it and add it to the diary, or swipe it to log it exactly as planned.

Thirty minutes before a planned meal's time it moves across on its own: it appears under Added, at its own hour among the meals you logged, carrying a Planned label and an Add meal button so it is one tap away. It stays there if the hour passes and you have not logged it - logging it late is exactly what it is waiting for - and it leaves the moment you add it.

In the hi.fitness app, swipe a logged meal to the left to take it back out of the diary. You are asked to confirm first - the swipe is quick and the deletion is not - and once you do, the meal and its calories leave the day straight away.

Today's goals

The Today's goals card shows the calories, protein, carbs and fat you have consumed so far against your daily target, each with a small progress bar. The target is whatever is saved on your account, so the web app and the mobile app always show the same numbers. Completing the intake survey sets a starting target for you; after that it only changes when you or your coach change it - logging a new weight never moves it on its own. Redoing the intake survey does replace it; and once a new weight has been logged the goal card can offer to recalculate - you decide.

Past days keep the target that was in force when you logged them. Change your goal today and last week still shows last week's food against last week's target - your history is not rewritten. Days from a time when you had no target at all show what you ate, with nothing to compare it against.

Log a meal

Tap Log meal to add what you ate. You have a few ways to do it:

• Describe it. Write what you ate in one sentence and the app estimates the foods, amounts and macros for you. Review the result before saving - adjust any amount, and a meal with several items is grouped together under one name.
• From today's plan. If you have a plan, log one of the day's meals in a single tap.
• Photograph it. Point the camera at the plate and the app works out what is on it. Everyone can do this and see the foods it recognized; the amounts, calories and macros need a subscription - see Your subscription.
• Barcode. In the hi.fitness app, scan a packaged product's barcode with the camera; on the web, type the number in by hand.

Foods you count. When you describe something in pieces - "10 eggs", "half a Snickers" - the review row shows the count beside the weight, with plus and minus buttons: 10 × egg, 600 g. Stepping the count moves the weight and the macros with it, and typing a weight updates the count. Foods you measured rather than counted show the weight only.

Estimates are approximate, so feel free to tweak the amount before or after saving.

Scan a barcode

In the hi.fitness app, tap the barcode icon at the top of the Log meal screen. Point the camera at the barcode on the package and hold it inside the frame - there is no button to press. The light toggle helps when the code is on the underside of something.

A scan never logs anything by itself. The product comes back as a card you check first: its name, its brand, and the macros for a sensible serving. When the package says what one serving weighs, the card opens on one piece - the whole bar, not 100 g of it - and a row of buttons above it offers the other amounts we know about. Step the count, type a weight, then add it to your diary when it looks right.

If we do not have that product yet, you are told so along with the number you scanned - describe the food in the message box instead and it is added like any other meal. Scanning never counts against your daily limit for describing, dictating and photographing meals.

How calories are counted

A row's calories always add up from its own macros: protein and carbs count 4 kcal per gram, fat 9 and alcohol 7. That means the calorie figure you see always matches the protein, carbs and fat beside it.

When the app recognizes a packaged product and knows the energy printed on its label, it uses that figure instead. A label accounts for things plain arithmetic does not, such as fiber, which is counted inside carbohydrate but carries roughly half the energy.

Drinks count their alcohol. A 500 ml beer at 5% holds about 20 g of pure alcohol, which is roughly 140 kcal on its own. Beer, wine and spirits are logged with that energy included, so a night out shows up honestly in your day.

Your food log

Below the targets sits your food log table, with columns for Time, Meal, Food, Calories, Protein, Carbs and Fat, and a daily Total at the bottom. A described or plan meal shows as a single meal with its ingredients grouped underneath it.

Editing your entries

Everything edits in place. Tap a name, amount, meal type or time to change it - editing an amount rescales that item's macros for you. You can delete a single item or a whole meal. Undo and Redo are there if you change your mind, and every change saves automatically.

Say when you ate it

You do not have to log a meal the moment you eat it. Mention the time and it is understood: "I drank a cola at 1pm", "oatmeal at 7:30", "a coffee an hour ago". The meal opens with that time already filled in, and you can still adjust it before saving. Works whether you type it, dictate it, or add a note to a photo.

Times only ever land on the day you are looking at, so to log something from an earlier day, move to that day first.

Ate it again? Copy it forward

If you ate the same thing yesterday, you do not have to describe it twice. Go back to the day it is on, open the meal and choose Copy to today, then confirm. The whole meal - every ingredient, with its amounts and macros - is added to today at the current time, and the meal type follows that hour: a breakfast copied at nine in the evening is logged as dinner.

The original stays exactly where it was.

Change a meal by describing it

Already saved a meal and realized something was missing? Open it and choose Describe a change, then say what changed in one sentence: "add one spoon of butter", "only half the rice", "that was turkey, not chicken", "drop the coke".

You see the rewritten meal first - ingredients added, removed or re-weighed, with the calories and macros recalculated - and it is only saved when you press Update. Until then your diary is untouched, so you can rephrase and try again as often as you like. If a change cannot be applied you are told so, and nothing is saved either way.

This works on meals with ingredients grouped under one name. A single standalone item is edited directly instead - tap its amount.

Your plan's meals, on the day

In the hi.fitness app, if you have a nutrition plan, each day also shows what the plan has you eating. Planned meals sit above your log, greyed out until you eat them. Tap one to open it with its full ingredient list, change any amount or the time, and add it to your diary. Once logged, it moves down into your food log and the suggestion disappears - so what stays on top is always what you still have left to eat.

Opening a planned meal now shows the recipe behind it, not just its numbers: the dish's photo where there is one, what it is in a sentence, its ingredients, and how it is prepared, along with servings and preparation time.

It is a page to read, with one action. The save button in the top right logs the meal as eaten, and asks you to confirm first - it writes several diary rows and closes behind them. To change an amount, log it and then open it from your food log, where meals have always been edited.

Not in the mood for what the plan says? The swap button next to save offers dishes that FIT the meal you are replacing - the same balance of protein, carbs and fat, each already portioned to that meal's calories, so swapping does not quietly rewrite your day. The search field narrows those suggestions; a button under them opens the full recipe library when you want to pick something else entirely. Either way you land on the dish itself - photo, macros, ingredients and method - and swap it in from there, so you never replace a meal with something you have only seen a line of. What the ingredient list shows is exactly what goes into your diary, at the planned meal's own time, and the meal you skipped drops off the day. Your plan is not changed: the same dish comes back next week, because a swap is about today, not about the plan. To change the plan itself, edit it in My Plan.

Daily limits on describing, dictating and photographing

Describing a meal, dictating one and photographing one all lean on the same understanding step, and each account gets a set number of those per day: 5 on the free tier, 40 with a subscription. Once you have used them up, the app says so, and offers to subscribe if you are on the free tier. The limit resets at midnight UTC.

Nothing is lost when that happens. You can still add foods by hand, log a meal from your plan, scan a barcode, copy a meal forward from another day, and edit anything already in your diary - none of that counts against the limit.

Voice notes stop on their own. When you record a meal, the recorder stops by itself after a set number of seconds (15 by default) and sends what it heard. A countdown appears for the last few seconds so you are not cut off mid-sentence. Recording again is always available if you want another go.

If a meal takes unusually long to come back, or you lose signal partway through, the app tells you which of those happened rather than leaving you watching a spinner.

Log from Apple Watch

Add the Nutrition complication to your watch face. Its lime ring shows the calories you have eaten today; the grey part is what remains to reach your goal. Tap it to see calories and P/C/F at a glance, then swipe to review today's logged meals. Add by voice opens the microphone, and you still review the recognized meal and macros before saving it. Opened this way, calories fill the whole screen: there is no close button, because pressing the Digital Crown takes you straight back to your watch face.

If you have a nutrition plan, the list button beside Add by voice opens Today's plan. Tap a planned meal to mark it eaten: it is added to your diary exactly as planned, the row receives a checkmark, and the calorie and macro progress updates.

The complication keeps showing the latest snapshot received from your iPhone even when the Watch app is closed. Opening hi.fitness on the phone refreshes it after your diary changes.

Sharing with your coach

If you are connected to a coach on hi.fitness, your coach can view your food diary in your shared workspace, updating live as you log. It's read-only for them - only you can log, edit or delete entries.