Keeping Tabs: Food Diary

A food diary that does not guess. Most trackers fill a gap with a zero. If a packet never declared its fibre, you are shown 0 g — and a day of those adds up to a number you can believe and should not. Keeping Tabs shows a dash instead, and goes on showing it until something declares otherwise. Absent is not zero. THE CATALOGUE IS ON YOUR PHONE 333,362 foods ship inside the app, 307,710 of them with nutrition recorded, weighted towards the shelves you actually stand in front of rather than a global average. A barcode scans and answers in a supermarket aisle with no signal, in a basement, on a plane. When a packet is not among them, Open Food Facts is asked — and only the barcode is sent, from a request carrying no account, no identifier and no cookies. You can switch that off. READ A LABEL Photograph the nutrition panel and it reads the figures off it. It also argues with them. Energy is not an independent fact — it is the macros multiplied out — so when the figures do not come to the kilojoules printed beside them, it says which one is wrong and what it probably said. A decimal point lost off small print is the commonest error there is, and it costs a factor of ten. TARGETS THAT FOLLOW WHAT YOU ACTUALLY BURN The first target comes from a formula, because on day one there is nothing else. After that it follows the evidence — your weigh-ins against what you logged — and it asks before it changes anything. Nothing moves your numbers behind your back, and it will never tell you what you would weigh in five weeks. Or set them yourself: energy, protein per kilogram of body weight, fat as a share of energy, a carbohydrate cap, a floor for fibre or iron or any single nutrient. Ranges rather than points, where a range is the honest answer. PAY ONCE, AND IT IS ALL YOURS One price, paid once, with everything in it: recording what you ate, searching the catalogue, scanning barcodes, reading labels, saved foods, meals, days and recipes, all forty nutrients, trends over any range you choose, every nutrient's history, the target that adapts, the Apple Watch app, the home screen widgets, and exporting the lot as CSV or JSON. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads, and nothing that expires. The catalogue lives inside the app, so one more person costs nothing to serve, and charging monthly would be rent on a thing that has no rent. YOUR DIARY STAYS ON YOUR PHONE Nothing you log is uploaded. There is no account and nothing to sign in to. Your diary stays on your phone, where nobody else can read it — including us. Apple Health is read-only and switched on one measurement at a time — weight, height, lean body mass, resting and active energy, cycle — and nothing is ever written back unless you ask for it. Kilojoules or calories, metric or imperial, throughout.