A complete, detailed reference for every screen and feature in Eatalyze. For a friendlier walkthrough, see the User Manual; for a fast lookup, see the Quick Reference Guide.
Contents
Core Concepts
Personalized targets
Every nutrient you track has a target range personalized to you — a recommended daily intake (RDI), plus a minimum and maximum. These are calculated using your profile (age, gender, height, weight, goals, and health conditions), not generic one-size-fits-all numbers.
Status: Deficient, Excess, On Track
Your actual intake for a nutrient is compared against its target range to produce a status:
- Deficient — below the healthy minimum for you
- On Track — within your target range
- Excess — above the healthy maximum for you
Direction: “less is” / “more is”
Separately from status, every nutrient has a direction — whether eating more of it or less of it is generally beneficial, harmful, or neutral for you. This is shown as colored arrows (down = less, up = more), green for good, red for caution, grey for neutral. A nutrient can be Deficient while “more” is still colored red (e.g. if it’s harmful in any meaningful quantity) — status and direction are related but distinct pieces of information.
Incomplete and approximate data
When a food or nutrient is newly added, Eatalyze saves it immediately with minimal information, then fills in the rest — full nutrient profile, target ranges, descriptions — in the background via AI, without blocking you from continuing to use the app. While this is in progress, you may see values marked “Incomplete.”
Separately, values can be marked approximate (shown with a ~ and a warning icon) for two different reasons: some of a food’s nutrient contributions haven’t finished resolving yet, or — for Week/Month/Year figures on the Trend view — the period hasn’t been fully logged, so the shown value is an estimate scaled up from the days that were actually logged, not a precise total.
Background sync
Eatalyze periodically checks for anything still incomplete — new foods without full nutrient data, new nutrients without target ranges, newly linked food-nutrient pairs — and resolves them via AI automatically. This happens in the background; a small “Syncing…” indicator appears in the app bar while it’s active. You don’t need to trigger this manually, though Settings offers a way to nudge it if AI was unavailable when you first set up your profile.
Foods
Adding a food
From the Foods tab, tap Add. At minimum, enter a name. The following fields exist on every food, most filled in automatically by AI once you save:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The food’s name |
| Description | A short summary of the food and its nutritional character, personalized to your profile |
| Synonyms | Alternate names for search |
| Country/Origin | Cuisine or origin association |
| Serving sizes (S/M/L) | Typical serving weights in grams, used when logging by “serving” instead of a weight/volume unit |
| Density | Grams per millilitre, used to convert volume units (cups, tablespoons, etc.) to grams |
| Recipe | Preparation guidance and recipe ideas tailored to your profile |
| External links | Practical advice on suggested quantity, cautions, and further reading |
| Barcode | If added via barcode scan, the scanned code, used for future lookups |
AI Prefill
When editing an existing food, an AI Prefill button re-runs the AI lookup for that food, refreshing its description, serving sizes, density, and recipe content. Newly-created foods don’t need this — it happens automatically in the background — this button is for manually refreshing an existing entry.
Barcode scanning
Tap the barcode icon to scan a packaged product. Eatalyze first checks the Open Food Facts database; if the product isn’t found there, it falls back to asking AI. If the food already exists in your list (matched by barcode), you’re taken straight to logging it.
Photo logging
Point your camera at a plate or tray of food. Eatalyze’s AI identifies each distinct item and estimates its weight using visual cues — plate size, portion height, and any reference objects visible (like a fork or coin) for scale. Review and adjust before confirming.
Recipes
A recipe is a food built from other foods as ingredients. Add each ingredient with its quantity and unit; the recipe’s own nutrient values are automatically derived by summing its ingredients, scaled to whatever total weight the recipe represents. Recipes are edited and logged just like any other food.
Marking a food obsolete
If a food is discontinued or you simply don’t want it appearing in search anymore, mark it obsolete rather than deleting it — this preserves historical diary entries that reference it while hiding it from new searches.
The “No AI” flag
If you’d rather manually control a specific food’s data and prevent AI from ever overwriting it during background sync, mark it “No AI.”
Diary
Logging an entry
From the Diary tab, tap Add, search for or add the food, then enter a quantity and choose a unit. The dropdown shows the gram-equivalent for that specific food next to each unit (e.g. “cup(142g)”), calculated from the food’s own density or serving size — the same unit means a different weight for different foods.
Daily Totals
Below your logged entries, Daily Totals shows, per nutrient, how much you’ve eaten today against your target — a progress bar, a percentage, and a smiley-style status badge, with directionality arrows on either side.
Date navigation
Use the date picker to review any past day. Future dates can’t be selected. A “jump to today” shortcut is available whenever you’re viewing a different date.
Copying a previous day
If your diet on a given day closely matches another day, use the copy feature to duplicate that day’s entries into the current one, rather than re-entering everything from scratch.
Nutrients
Adding a nutrient
At minimum, enter a name. The following fields exist on every nutrient:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| RDI, Min, Max | Your personalized target range for this nutrient |
| Units | The measurement unit (g, mg, mcg, kcal, etc.) |
| Less is / More is | Direction — whether eating less/more is good, bad, or neutral for you |
| Nutrient group | Category used for grouping in Show (e.g. Vitamins, Minerals, Fats) |
| Importance | Explanation of why this nutrient matters for you, including a note on absorption — which foods are the best sources, and how to maximize how much of it your body actually absorbs |
| Top food sources | Foods that are particularly good sources of this nutrient, respecting your dietary restrictions |
Ratio nutrients
Some nutrients are expressed as a ratio between two others (for example, a calcium-to-magnesium ratio) rather than an absolute amount. These are calculated automatically from their two component nutrients and aren’t logged directly.
AI Prefill
Same as with foods — refreshes an existing nutrient’s target ranges and descriptive content. New nutrients fill in automatically in the background without needing this.
Show
Groups view
Nutrients grouped by status — Deficient, Excess, On Track — each shown with its category-level severity and individual nutrients underneath.
Graph view
The same grouping, with a visual progress bar per nutrient showing where your actual intake falls within your target range.
Trend view
Compares Day, Week, Month, and Year side by side for each nutrient — useful for seeing whether you’re improving over time rather than judging a single day in isolation. If a period isn’t fully logged (say, only 2 of the last 7 days), the shown figure is an extrapolated estimate — scaled up based on the days you did log — and marked as approximate rather than left blank.
Date and period selection
Choose any past date (future dates aren’t selectable) and the period length to review.
Report
Generates a detailed, shareable report reflecting whichever date is currently selected on the Show screen — clearly labeled “Data as of” that date, separate from the timestamp showing when the report itself was generated. Includes a full nutrient breakdown, trends, frequent foods, and personalized recommendations.
AI Features
Ask AI
A free-form chat for nutrition questions. Every response takes your profile — goals, restrictions, health conditions — into account, and can reference your actual logged foods when relevant.
Meal advice
Ask what to eat for the rest of the day, and Eatalyze looks at your current deficient and excess nutrients, your dietary restrictions, and the foods you eat most often, then suggests specific meals or snacks that would help close the gap — prioritizing foods you’re likely to actually want to eat.
Settings
Profile
Your age, gender, height, weight, ethnicity, dietary restrictions, goals, and health conditions — used throughout the app to personalize targets, advice, and AI responses. Updating your profile automatically triggers a check for new nutrients or foods worth adding based on the change.
API Key
Your own Gemini API key, required for AI features. Stored securely on your device.
Suggest Nutrients & Foods for My Profile
Manually re-runs the AI-based profile suggestions — useful if AI wasn’t available when you first set up your profile or last updated it, though this also happens automatically in the background.
Backup Data
Saves a copy of your foods, nutrients, and diary entries, along with your profile and API key, to a file. The profile/key portion is stored as plain text — keep this file private.
Restore Data
Replaces all current data with what’s in a selected backup file, including your profile and API key if that backup included them. This cannot be undone.
Export/Import Food & Nutrient Names
A lighter-weight alternative to a full backup — exports or imports just the names of your foods or nutrients as a CSV file, without full nutrient data (which then fills in via background sync after import).
Send Feedback
Opens a pre-filled email in your own email app for reporting bugs or suggesting features.
Privacy & Data
All of your profile, food, and diary data is stored locally on your device. Eatalyze does not operate a server of its own and does not have access to this data. AI features send relevant data (food names, nutrient names, and personalization details from your profile) to Google’s Gemini API to generate responses — see our Privacy Policy for full details on what’s shared and with whom.