What belongs in a food diary?
- Every meal and snack – breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between.
- Drinks – juice, soft drinks, coffee with milk and alcohol often add more than you'd think.
- Amounts – in grams, millilitres or pieces; for rice and pasta, note whether weighed raw or cooked.
- Oil, butter and sauces – small but calorie-dense.
- Optional: weight, exercise and how full you felt.
Paper or digital?
Paper is quick, but you have to look up and add up calories and nutrients yourself. Digital does it automatically: search a food or scan its barcode, enter the amount – calories, protein, carbs and fat appear instantly. Save frequent meals as favourites and log them again with one tap. With Premium it's even faster: count calories from a photo.
How long should you keep a food diary?
Even one week reveals the typical patterns: when you eat a lot, which drinks add up, how big your portions really are. For a reliable picture when losing weight, two to four weeks are ideal – then you can compare your weight trend with your food.
Honesty beats perfection. Mark the days you logged completely: half-logged days skew the average. That's why FreeMealTracker counts unlogged days as "no data", never as zero calories.
How to review your food diary
- Compare your daily average with your needs from the calorie calculator.
- Find your three biggest calorie sources per day – that's usually the easiest place to change something.
- Watch your protein: enough of it keeps you full for longer while losing weight.
- Look at the weight trend over weeks, not single days.
The monthly overview in the calorie counter shows all of this automatically – free and ad-free.