App to track food but not calories
June 7, 2017 5:02 AM   Subscribe

I'm looking for a free or low cost Android app to track my food intake. I don't want something that tracks calories or requires me to enter precise amounts or makes value judgements about the food I'm eating, just a simple way to log my meals and snacks.

Google is failing me as it just shows apps geared towards calorie counting and dieting or monitoring food intolerances, which is not what I want. I don't need a barcode scanner or a prepopulated database of food, entering my own meals is fine or even preferable. If not an app designed for this, other ideas are welcome, but it needs to be something I can update on my phone during the day.
posted by pandabort to Food & Drink (8 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Food Diary is perfect for this. It costs 99c and, while it allows you to enter symptoms, you can ignore that part entirely and just end up with a list of what you ate, no nutritional info, no judgment. `
posted by mishafletch at 5:29 AM on June 7, 2017


Honestly, I just use a text file. The only "fancy" part is that I'm using an (iPhone) app that syncs the file to my desktop, unless you count date divisions as fancy:

==========================
2017-06-06 - Tuesday
==========================

I jot down what I've eaten and when, and I keep track of how much water I've had too.

I tried a lot of different apps and I settled on the text file because of the flexibility and ease of searching and reviewing past entries.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 5:34 AM on June 7, 2017


Response by poster: Also I want to be able to enter the time that I ate rather than categorising things as breakfast, lunch, snack etc.
posted by pandabort at 6:24 AM on June 7, 2017


I hunted around for one, but wound up just using google docs. I couldn't find anything that really fit my needs. Secret Sparrow's text file would work, too. The issue for me was the need to be more descriptive of what I was eating to track allergy reactions, and none of the apps really suited that, at least not easier than just listing them all out in a document. I was also tracking symptoms, so that was a problem for me, too.
posted by backwards compatible at 8:20 AM on June 7, 2017


Have you ever visited a registered dietitian? I have. I have Crohn's disease and meal tracking (to line up foods with signs and symptoms over time) is a baseline approach to managing it. I have a smartphone and use a single "Notes" page per week. That's it. I write down my meals, what time I had them, and the time of onset of any signs and symptoms. An RD will usually recommend people keep a notebook for these thing, which I did for years before smartphones.

If you're not looking to perform any analysis on your information, or even encode meal information in a routine way, all you need is text in a simple document.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 8:36 AM on June 7, 2017


I recently went down this road and looked and looked and haven't found anything like what you're asking for. I'm using Google sheets on my phone and desktop. It's pretty much an Excel spreadsheet.
posted by vivzan at 10:30 AM on June 7, 2017


Response by poster: Thanks all. After some consideration I just bought a notebook and I'll do it the old fashioned way!
posted by pandabort at 12:40 PM on June 7, 2017


I LOVE "SIMPLE DIET DIARY"!! You can decide to include calorie or other nutrient details, but you don't have to. (That running calorie total at the bottom of the screenshot? It simply isn't there if you turn off the setting to track calories.) Very customizable.

It only takes a second to log something--type it in and you're done. For even faster entry, it remembers past entries and you can copy and paste from a previous day in seconds. You can set it to automatically mark entries with the timestamp. The developer actively updates the app and even has a Google group for updates and suggestions if I'm not mistaken.
posted by mama casserole at 3:46 AM on June 8, 2017


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