User Guide

1. First run & choosing your element

Out of the box the app tracks nickel with a daily limit of 150 µg, a common target for a low-nickel diet. You can change both at any time — see Settings. The element you choose is shown under the daily ring, and every food value in the app is interpreted as that element measured in micrograms (µg) per 100 grams of food.

2. The home screen

The home screen is your daily dashboard. From top to bottom it shows the date navigator, the daily progress ring, the meal logger, the Food Management panel, and the day's mood and notes.

• Date navigator — use the < and > arrows to move between days, or tap the date to jump to a specific one. A cue above the date says Today, Yesterday, or how many days back you're viewing, so you always know which day you're logging.
• Daily ring — your running total for the day against your limit.
• Logging selector — pick which meal you are adding food to.
• Food Management — an expandable panel for searching food values, opening the full database, and managing recipes.
• How did today feel? and Notes — your personal journal for the day.

The icons in the top bar open Trends & History (the bar-chart icon) and Settings (the gear).

3. Reading the daily ring

The ring fills as you log food and changes color to tell you where you stand against your limit. The thresholds are configurable in Settings.

By default the ring turns amber at the caution threshold (80% of your limit) and red at the over threshold (100%). In the example below the day has reached 181 µg against a 150 µg nickel limit, so the ring is red — and the day is tagged Rough with a note about what pushed it over.

4. Logging a meal

1. Tap Logging: Select a Meal to Log and choose Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or Snacks.
2. In the meal card that appears, type a food name into the Food field. Matching foods drop down as you type — tap one to fill in its reference value automatically.
3. Enter the amount you ate and pick a unit (grams by default; common piece and portion units are also available).
4. Tap the + button to add it. The food appears in the meal and both the meal total and the daily ring update instantly.

Each logged row has a pencil icon to edit the amount or value and a trash icon to remove it. When you're done with a meal, tap the ✕ in the meal header to collapse it — your entries are saved automatically.

5. Searching the food database

To look up a food's value without logging it, open Food Management and use the Food Name field. The app searches its built-in database, the built-in compound recipes, and any recipes you've created.

Each food is a single entry with one value, pooled and averaged across every measurement in the source data rather than split into a separate row per country — so the list stays short and readable. Search matches every word you type in any order, so cooked egg and egg, cooked both find the same food; exact and start-of-name matches sort to the top.

To save or correct a value yourself, type the food name, enter a number in the Value (µg/100g) field, and tap Save to DB.

6. Looking up foods that aren't listed

If you search for a food that isn't in the local database, the app offers an inline look-up row. From there you can:

• Search USDA FoodData Central — a direct query to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's public food database.
• Search the web — an in-app browser lookup that reads a value from a Google AI Overview. It only accepts a reading that sits next to both the tracked element and your food's name, so a figure for a different food on the same results page is rejected rather than saved as a confident wrong number. It takes a few readings, treats a reported range as its midpoint, and retries alternate word orders if the first wording finds nothing. When the readings agree it offers that figure; when they don't, it shows a Pick a value chooser so you decide (or enter your own). Either way the confirmation shows its work — every run's reading plus the exact page text the value came from — and an unusually high reading is flagged for you to verify before it's kept (the threshold is adjustable in Settings). For an uncommon food, tick Deeper search in the look-up dialog to search longer and try more wordings. You always confirm the value before it's kept.
• Prepared dish — look up ingredients online — for a cooked dish rather than a single ingredient (say chicken piccata), tick this option when logging and the app looks the dish up in TheMealDB recipe database, lists its typical ingredients, sums their values, and lets you review the total before logging. Only the dish name is sent. See Compound foods.

Whatever value you accept is written into your local database with the Save to DB action, so the next time you type that food it's already there. These lookups only run when you ask for a food or dish the app doesn't already know — see privacy.

7. Managing the food database

Open Food Management → View & Manage Food Database to see the full list. Every entry shows its name and value in µg per 100 g.

• Use the search box to filter the list as you type.
• Tap a row's pencil to edit it in place — rename a food or correct its value without deleting and re-adding it.
• Tick one or more checkboxes to select foods, then delete them — handy for pruning foods you'll never log.
• Tap Look up food in the corner to look up and add a food — or a prepared dish — without leaving this screen. It's the same look-up tools described above, so a value you find is saved straight into the database.

8. Compound foods & custom recipes

A compound food is a dish made of several ingredients. The app ships with recipes for many common items — type something like big mac, whopper, or turkey club sandwich and it breaks the dish into its ingredients and sums their values.

For a cooked dish that isn't in any recipe list, tick Prepared dish — look up ingredients online when logging it. The app searches TheMealDB for the dish, lists its typical ingredients, estimates a per-serving portion for each, and sums their values so you can review the total before saving. Only the dish name leaves your device — see privacy.

Every real ingredient is kept, even if the app can't price it. Ingredients missing from your database are looked up in USDA FoodData Central automatically, and any that still have no value (nickel, for example, isn't in USDA's data) are listed at an unknown value so they stay visible and editable rather than being silently dropped. Tap Look up all missing to price the remaining ones from a single online search in one pass, or fill any of them in by hand. The same batch look-up is available in the meal compound editor and the recipe builder.

You can also build your own. Open Food Management → My Recipes.

1. Tap + New Recipe.
2. Give the recipe a name — this becomes a searchable food you can log like any other.
3. Tap Add Ingredient to build it up. Adjust portions, substitute ingredients, or remove ones you skip to lower the total.
4. Add free-text notes / instructions if you like, then tap Save.

The dialog shows a running Total so you can see the trade-offs as you tweak the recipe. Saved recipes appear in autocomplete tagged as compound.

Sharing recipes

The My Recipes screen has import and export buttons in its top bar. Export saves your current element's recipes to a single shareable file — just the recipes, not your logs or settings. Import loads a recipe file from someone else (or another device); imported recipes are added alongside your own without overwriting anything, and each keeps the element it was built for, so a nickel recipe's values aren't reinterpreted under a different element.

9. Favorite meals & repeating a day

If you eat the same combination often, you don't have to re-add each food. Every meal card's header carries three reuse controls:

• The ♡ heart (Save Favorite) stores the current meal as a reusable template.
• The ★ star (Recall Favorites) lets you drop a saved template back into any meal in one tap.
• The ⧉ copy (Copy this meal from yesterday) pulls the same meal from the previous day into today. It appends to whatever is already there and does nothing if yesterday's meal was empty. Because it works one meal at a time, you can repeat breakfast without dragging in last night's dinner.

10. Mood & notes journal

Below the meal logger, How did today feel? lets you tag the day Good, Okay, or Rough, and the Notes box captures symptoms, energy, or anything else worth remembering. These travel with the day, so when you review your history you can line up how you felt against what you ate.

11. Trends & history

Tap the bar-chart icon in the top bar to open Trends & History. Toggle between a Week bar chart and a Month calendar, each colored by how the day landed against your limit.

Use the arrows to move between weeks or months. Tap a day to open it and read its journal entry alongside the chart.

Exporting a report for your clinician

The PDF icon in the top bar builds a report you can save or share — handy to bring to a clinic visit. Tap it and pick a date range (it defaults to the last month), then tap Export and choose where to save the PDF.

12. Settings, limits & backup

The gear icon opens Tracking Settings.

Backup & restore

Under Backup & Restore, Back up to file… saves a single file containing your foods, favorites, recipes, daily logs, and settings. You can store it anywhere your device's file picker reaches — Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or local storage.

Restore from file… loads a backup back into the app. Restoring replaces everything currently in the app — foods, favorites, logs, and settings — so the app asks you to confirm first, and the action can't be undone. To move to a new phone, back up on the old device and restore on the new one.

Have a question? Read the FAQ →