About the app.

Meals and foods

In the beginning it will seem like a lot of work to enter all the tedious details of every meal and exercise. For most people it will get a lot faster after the first couple weeks. Most people eat the same few things over and over, however urbane and adventurous you might think you are. Once your favorite local breakfast scone and usual lunch bowl are entered, they'll be right there in User Foods and in the Most Recent list.

The master food database is derived from the USDA "What We Eat in America" survey-driven data set [1], which aims to get a realistic view of what people are really consuming. It has fewer entries for raw ingredients (another database might have hundreds of beef cuts, each listed separately by three levels of fat trim), but more whole prepared items like an enchilada or omelette. The database has a large number of micronutrients which can be tracked, from folate to theobromine.

Despite the focus on whole dishes, the WWEIA food database has every item listed on a 100 gram basis. We have tried to go through all 5000+ items and come up with reasonable serving sizes. Your local pub or pizza joint may serve bigger or smaller burgers or slices. You can enter your own foods or make up new dishes as you like. Most recently used food items are saved in a quick access list.

Workouts and calorie burn

Data for calorie burn during exercise comes from the exhaustive Adult Compendium of Physical Activities [2], Herrmann et al., a formal scientific paper in which results from researchers all over the world are compiled every few years. The 2024 edition reports using 2356 results from 701 published papers.

Scanning the list of calorie burn (MET) values, one can quickly find redundancies and a few conflicts. This is an inherently messy process, as the experiments are difficult to control and there is always a subjective intensity level. We've taken the time to reconcile all the activities and make a practical list.

The list of gym exercises sticks to the basics. You can add the exercises you actually do as you go, instead of wading through a long list every time. A workout can be tagged with a routine name for re-use later (call them whatever you want; this author uses routines named A, B, C, AB2, BA1, C2 etc). Again it will be a bit tedious to enter every set of a workout the first time, but once you do it's there to be copied and re-used or edited. Each set can be 'scratched' if it's going to be skipped that day but kept in the workout for the next time you do that routine.

Ancient history

Way back in the pre-smartphone era there were a pair of apps for PocketPC, Pocket Diet Tracker and MySportTraining. They were from different developers but they talked to each other and daily net calories showed up. Eventually the two applications merged into VidaOne Diet and Fitness, for smartphones and desktops. Sadly that application was abandoned in the 2010s. With no development, every new version of Android broke it a little. The latest phones refuse to install it. So, we had to work up this application to keep up a 20 year streak of keeping workout data.