Manual Food and Habit Logging Gets Abandoned Fast
61 posts across 12 communities in the last 30 days; 30% from App Store.
“Thanks, that's really useful feedback! You're right, the weekly total is the whole point and I only described it. Here's what the week screen looks like: every snack lands in one of 5 movement patterns (push, pull, legs, core, mobility), and the shape shows you right away if the…”
“Yeah, that's the real problem. Transcription is easy now; trusting the number is the hard part. What I do: - The model never invents calories. It only splits "a bowl of pasta and a coke" into foods and amounts; the numbers come from a nutrition database and official restaurant…”
“That rice/chicken split pinpoints the problem: you needed to say “right food, wrong amount,” but the correction treated both as wrong. An explicit “Edit portion” control beside the quantity in SnapCal would make that distinction clearer. Your instinct to click the food name is…”
People struggle to maintain consistent tracking habits, finding the effort required for detailed logging unsustainable. They recognize the value of the data but are overwhelmed by the manual processes and time commitment, leading to abandonment of tracking tools. This highlights a disconnect between desired outcomes and the effort required to achieve them.
SOURCES (60)
“Your free tier is manual logging, but the thing your title sells, typing a meal in plain words, runs on credits. So the homepage should say how many typed meals the sign-up credits cover, counted in meals rather than credits, and what a pack or…”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★★★ 3/5 (v26.41.0) — App takes to long to open. Meal scan is only right 10% of the time and the portions are always way off. Logging food is annoying,”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★ 1/5 (v26.41.0) — A good portion of the items you scan by barcode or even search come up with very wrong nutritional information so you really have to double check before logging. I would be ok with it if on the manual add I can add more than just fat, carbs and protein because now I’m paying for a service but I still have to manually keep track of sodium, cholesterol, potassium, ect…. Because a lot comes up wrong as I said above. Maybe add a feature where you can take a picture”
“There's literally an app and site called "Just the Recipe" https://www.justtherecipe.com/ that does a good portion of that. [re: A recipe App that gives you Just The Recipe.]”
“Your third question, would you use it for another meal instead of your current tracker, only gets a real answer if the tester logs the same meal in both, so ask for that side by side and the correction count becomes comparable. One small thing: the sidebar here says "Please tag title with stage and system, i.e., [Android, Alpha] or [IOS, Beta]", and your title has the platform but not the stage. I make ThreadFox. Our AI employee finds Reddit threads where people say logging meals takes”
“Yeah, that’s fair. I think the positioning may be overpromising a bit here. In my own use I actually weigh food fairly often and usually know what went into the meal — I’m much more likely to type “120g chicken, 180g potatoes, a bit of olive oil” than just “chicken sandwich” and expect the app to magically know the portion. So there may be a mismatch between how I actually use the product and what the landing page suggests the core use case is. The value for me is more in removing the database/s”
“Thanks so much for trying it and for such a clear note! Glad the edit flow felt light, and sorry about the carrots. The portion control is the part I’ve now heard twice that it isn’t obvious enough, so that’s high on my list to improve. Quick question if you don’t mind: when you were tapping around, where did you try first, the food name, the “150 g” text, or somewhere else? [re: [iOS, Beta] I'm building BiteJot to make meal logging less of a chore — looking for honest feedback]”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★★ 2/5 (v26.40.0) — Has food database search/ barcode scan, taking photos of meals are paid”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★★★ 3/5 (v26.40.0) — The app is generally great, however there are a couple of things I hope the developers fix. I’m a late GenX / Xennial so the “streak” celebration that I have to stop and click out of while it shoots fireworks at my eyes for logging my first ingredient of a day is Super annoying. As in, it’s the reason for this review. Make it optional, Please! If I could find a way to turn “streaks off” 5 stars. Even with the annoying bit of having to manually change what meal”
“For YourMeal, I’d focus on where people already ask how to track meals without creating an account. Pick one such community, answer a real question with a useful food-tracking tip, and make the no-sign-up part clear only if it directly helps. Track visits and paid sign-ups from that source for a month. [re: One new subscriber yesterday.]”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★★ 2/5 (v26.40.0) — Cronometer is way better barcode scan is not locked behind a paywall ads are short then you can skip you can see your nutrition stats without paying once I stopped paying for premium I went looking for another app”
“Thanks, that's really useful feedback! You're right, the weekly total is the whole point and I only described it. Here's what the week screen looks like: every snack lands in one of 5 movement patterns (push, pull, legs, core, mobility), and the shape shows you right away if the week leaned one way. And good catch on the tag 😅I can't edit the title anymore but I'll use [Android, iOS, Beta] from now on 🙏🏻 I'll add your question to my list too: does watching the week fil”
“the foldable layout actually makes a ton of sense for a diary screen, way less scrolling [re: NutriTrace v1.4.0 released: offline mode in the browser, foldable support, and more]”
“Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project. [re: NutriTrace v1.4.0 released: offline mode in the browser, foldable support, and more]”
“NutriTrace is a self-hosted nutrition tracker, an alternative to MyFitnessPal, Cronometer and Lose It. AGPL-3.0, single Docker container, native Android app, no telemetry and no cloud sync. Your food diary is a SQLite file on your own machine. Part of the TraceApps family: NutriTrace (nutrition), CookTrace (recipes / pantry / shopping), LiftTrace (strength / lifting), NoteTrace (notes / tasks / reminders). New here? It is a food diary first. Log by barcode, search, a photo or a sentence ("t”
“I don't have the technical skills, but if someone does I would really love to see integration of simple calorie protein and fiber fields that actually calculate you calories in the day when you choose those recipes and also having a quick ad where you just put the calories of what you think if it's not one of the recipes. Basically each recipe help me to be a literally to add calorie fiber and protein, and also the ability to separately add of calories, fiber, or protein for the day (sep”
“love the focus on the why, most trackers just throw a checkbox at you and call it a day. i started writing my reason on a sticky note a few months back and it's weird how much that little thing helps when i don't feel like doing the thing. signed up with my sister, curious to see if the nudge thing keeps us both from slacking. [re: [iOS, Beta] Routina — your accountability buddy that starts with your why]”
“Platforms this should cover iOS Problem / motivation Please add an option to display everything in kj rather than just kcal. For example, there is currently no way to have your daily limit presented in kJ on either the app or the widget Proposed solution Add kj Alternatives considered No response Additional context No response”
“Using Jev here would be counterproductive, resulting in greater expense and complexity; image recognition would be required to estimate calories for this individual’s app. No simple or inexpensive method exists to extract data from an image and transmit it to Jev. [re: Too good to be true? 13k installs, 4.7 stars, ~€22k revenue. All in I'm still in the minus]”
“I'm a woman. A year ago I decided to get my health back on track and lose some weight: clean whole foods, moved every day, got sunlight. During the year, I weighed myself every day, more out of curiosity — despite many people suggesting "throwing away your scale" when losing weight. I'm glad that I did not throw away my scale. I made a lot of interesting observations!!! Here is what I've found: Right after my period, I often start to lose water weight. 2–3 days before ovula”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★ 1/5 (v26.40.0) — Go for Cronometer or LoseIt! Don’t get this app. They’ve changed the UI and it is so hard to see now how many calories you have left, what any of your meals involved and how many calories or any of your nutritional data. This app is garbage now. All of its utility is gone. You can’t easily view anything anymore. I don’t know why they changed the UI like this.”
“Thanks for testing 👍 Which part of the calorie input screen did you find confusing — was it the food entry fields, serving/quantity, calories/macros, or something else? Also, did you manage to create a WeightQuest account successfully? I’m checking the tester flow at the moment because I want to make sure registrations are coming through properly. One other thing I don’t currently see you in the Google tester group either. Maybe I’ve missed you, but at the moment I can’t see any sign that you’v”
“just joined the group, app looks clean so far but the calorie input screen is bit confusing with so many fields”
“Yeah, that's the real problem. Transcription is easy now; trusting the number is the hard part. What I do: - The model never invents calories. It only splits "a bowl of pasta and a coke" into foods and amounts; the numbers come from a nutrition database and official restaurant data. - Vague amounts get a visible default ("bowl" = a standard serving, shown in grams), and your own grams or cups always win. - Nothing logs silently. You see a review card and can fix it by tap”
Hahaha I’m glad I’m not the only one 😂 I’d definitely qualify for NOA
“That rice/chicken split pinpoints the problem: you needed to say “right food, wrong amount,” but the correction treated both as wrong. An explicit “Edit portion” control beside the quantity in SnapCal would make that distinction clearer. Your instinct to click the food name is useful feedback about where you expected editing to begin.”
“that's a good breakdown, separating the two parts like that. i tried it with my lunch yesterday and the estimate was way off for the rice but the chicken was close enough. finding where to edit the portion was not super clear at first, i kept clicking on the food name instead of the number next to it and to answer your question, i couldn't figure out how to change just the portion without it flagging the whole item wrong. maybe i missed it but i ended up deleting and re-adding manually”
“Nice. Someone else that's as particular as I am, lol. We may need a support group like NOA (Notion Overengineers Anonymous), lol 😆”
“This looks so nice and seems very helpful! I'm in a similar situation where I cook large meals for my family to take smaller portions from, which makes it harder to count those calories. I was wondering if you had this available as a template?”
“The grid is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Every one of those tiles has the same 45 degree lightbox look as the DK cookbooks my mum had, where porridge and roast chicken photograph identicly. I used to look at the pictures for hours and never cooked one thing out of them.”
“Summary The "Add entry" screen offers a manual carbohydrate entry that writes a totalCarbohydrate NutritionRecord to Health Connect – but no equivalent entries for protein, total fat, or energy. Please consider adding them, ideally as one combined "daily nutrition totals" entry. Use case I track nutrition in a separate app (Yazio) that does not write to Health Connect. To get my daily totals into OpenVitals (dashboard + weekly PDF report), I currently need a second app whose only job is to write”
“Notion has no food database, so you're hand-entering calories for every ingredient, which is the exact work Cronometer and MyFitnessPal already did for you. A template doesn't fix that, it just makes the manual entry prettier.”
Good job! My setup is so basic, but it helps me track my calorie intake.
“I cook most of my meals at home and don’t live alone, so calorie tracking homemade food used to involve way too much math 😅 I ended up building this recipe system in Notion and it’s become something I genuinely use all the time. I add the ingredients I actually use and the finished weight of the food, and it calculates the calories and macros per 100g. Then I can enter how many calories I want and it tells me how many grams to put on my plate — so everyone can eat the same meal even if we want”
“I’ve seen a load of recipe books that are so over complicated with formulas with buttons that add the recipe to your meal plan and then automatically add ingredients lists to shopping lists etc. imo this is very simple in comparison”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★ 1/5 (v26.39.0) — The good: intuitive interface, barcode scanning, easy meal logging, decent premium features. The bad: unreliable nutrition database that undermines the entire purpose of the app. Even the "verified" entries aren't always accurate. My advice: If you use this app, treat it as a rough estimate only. Always verify entries against the nutrition label on your food packaging before logging. If precision matters to you (like if you're following a specific diet for med”
“At what point did you let your teenager take more responsibility for their own nutrition? I want mine to understand how food affects energy, mood and concentration without making them feel monitored or criticized since simply telling them to “eat healthier” doesn’t seem very useful. My teenager would happily rotate through the same four or five meals every week. Vegetables are rare, fruit depends on the day and anything unfamiliar is immediately rejected. I don’t want food to become a power stru”
“Yeah, so I’m planning to use AI as parser to extract entities and weights into a structured JSON. Then C++ backend would make query to the local nutrition db (with foundational food it’s about 30-60mb on disk)”
“Thanks for sharing the FeedMeNot link. A first-use explanation of “urge released” could help people understand when to tap it before they're dealing with a craving.”
“Hi there! I'd like to be able to log workouts in the MCP and have them adjust my calorie goal for the day, the way most nutrition apps do. This would be nice since it gives me a more realistic picture of my deficit on active days, and makes it clear when there's room for a treat. How it would work: Log a workout with the calories burned (e.g. from my watch) Only a configurable percentage of that gets credited, to account for watches overestimating The credited amount is added to that day's calor”
“For TRAK’s beta invitation, I’d show one Australian or New Zealand supermarket meal being logged by barcode and exact grams, followed by that day’s workout in the same app. That demonstrates your combined food-and-workout workflow more clearly than the full feature list, while making the local database coverage concrete. Are your intended testers already tracking food and workouts in separate apps?”
“Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.”
“tested it with my leftover pasta from last night, digestion load was high and honestly my stomach agrees completely”
“Same here 🤤 I always use the visuals when planning for my weekly shopping. Helps me to feel inside and wonder what I crave. Love your idea to add ingredient tags. Helps filtering or even building a shopping list - as suggested! For every recipe I find online, I also add a link to the blog or reel or tutorial to quickly see how it is made. https://preview.redd.it/1mqlu6w1w7th1.png?width=2174&format=png&auto=webp&s=a799fdb63e935af464dd8297ba06b193fc18b519”
“The main question is whether other people have the same logging problem, not whether the app works for you. Ask 10 people who already track food to screen-share how they log a meal today, then let each try your plain-language input on a meal they actually ate. If they go back to their old app, ask what was missing before you add anything else.”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★ 1/5 (v26.39.0) — If you want to have to pay for what every other person gets for free get this app. It works awesome if you’re paying for it through the nose. Google health free, Cronometer free, Apple health free. MyFitnessPal $$$$$$$”
“Three months building CoKarTa and the only person using it is me. I'm a solo dev from Spain, and I'm here hoping a few of you will try to break it. I got obsessed with fitness and nutrition, and every food tracker I tried felt wrong somehow, so I built my own. You type what you ate the way you'd say it out loud, like "add the vanilla protein drink to dinner", and it logs the meal and counts the calories. You can also just ask it things about food. I use it every day and I l”
“There are umpteen billion calorie trackers, including one super popular one with a free mode that is annoying, but tolerable. I don't mean to be an asshole, but ... why would anyone pick your's?I think at the least you should consider giving your first 10k users free passes (and yelling it at the top of your lungs, because what you desperately need are your "early adopters") ...... or you'll never make it to 100k+ users (with some % of 90k of them actually paying you money).”
“I use Recipe Sage. Its awesome. The only thing is, it's a free app and I worry that in the future at some point, it will be unsupported and I'll loose all of my recipes.”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★★ 2/5 (v26.38.0) — I decided to dump weight watchers and go with MyFitnessPal premium because it synced with Garmin connect. The main function of the app is to track food so why do they make it so difficult. First I have found several bar codes that were not recognized. When entering food I generally weigh what I eat. The app is set up for package servings so your choices are 1 serving, the number of grams that is one serving i.e. 140 g, or one gram. My cheap scale only give oz a”
“[MyFitnessPal] ★★★ 3/5 (v26.38.0) — Why can’t we turn off the info about streaks? I find them unhelpful and more damaging than helpful. I do love this app, but the steaks are very annoying.”