First Time User Info

NutriDiary follows a meal oriented approach. By this we mean that rather than logging individual foods, you log meals. This offers the great advantage that you can then reuse the already created meals further down the line. As we all, more or less, have the same meals over and over again this approach makes food logging, or meal logging rather, a lot faster than with other diet management applications where you have to log the individual foods again and again.

If you wish, you can add individual foods straight to your log, but we highly recommend using meals whenever you can. You should start seeing the benefits of logging meals instead of foods after only about a week and it will significantly speed up the logging process over time.

Also, if you consume a meal that is similar to one you have already stored in the system, all you have to do is duplicate the stored meal and modify its copy. If, for example, you have had a salad containing 2 tomatoes, 100 grams lettuce, and a tea spoon of olive oil last week, and you have the same salad with 50 grams of lettuce instead, and half an avocado today, all you have to do is duplicate the first meal, modify the contents of the copy to reflect the quantity change of the lettuce, and finally add the avocado. For meals with a lot of foods this feature is particularly useful, because you don't have to go through finding and adding all the individual foods again.

The final concept that you will need to familiarize yourself with is meal status. When you create a new meal, its status is by default set to "open", this means that you can add foods to the meal and modify its contents. As soon as you finish adding all the foods of the meal you need to finalize it. You can do this by selecting the "finalized" option from the status drop-down box next to the meal's name. This allows you to add it to your log. You can always re-open the meal if you have to, but all the changes you will make will be reflected throughout your log, to all the days you consumed this meal on (if any). In case you re-open a finalized meal that is added anywhere in your log you will get a page explaining everything you need to know, so you don't have to worry about this right now.

To get started, you might want to create the meals you have had today or yesterday. To create a new meal go to the "meals" page and click on the "new meal" button. You will be prompted to enter the meal name, and then you will be taken to the meal analysis page. From there, by clicking the "add food" button you can start finding the foods you want to add to the meal one by one. The interface is quite intuitive and you will get help throughout the way via the "quick help" boxes displayed on the top of each screen.

When you finish creating the meals, finalize them and add them to your log ("my log") in the date they were consumed. You can change the date in your log by clicking on the arrows next to the current date, or by selecting a date from the "jump to" drop-down boxes and clicking on "go". Apart from meals, you can also log activities/exercises, water and fruit/veg consumption, as well as your body weight, body fat percentage, body measurements, and notes.

If you have any questions about what a particular feature does or how to use it, please start a new thread in our support forum.