Food logging
Six ways to get a meal into the day, what Steady records about it, and how it grades what you ate.
Food is logged into meals — breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, and dessert — which default to whatever fits the current time of day. Every meal rolls up into whole-day totals.
The six ways in
| Path | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Describe Your Meal | Type or dictate a sentence; AI itemizes every component separately with a portion assumption for each | Home cooking, restaurant meals, anything without a label |
| Photo of Food | Photograph the plate and AI reads it into separate items | When describing it is more work than shooting it |
| Recipe from a Link | Paste a recipe page or YouTube URL; reads the ingredients into items with a servings stepper | Cooking from a recipe you found online |
| Barcode scan | Crosshair reticle that reads only inside the frame | Packaged food |
| Database search | Live search of Open Food Facts (~3 million products, US-first, relevance ranked) | Branded items without the package handy |
| Saved Meals / Quick Log / Custom | Re-log a whole saved combo, a starred or recent food, or type the numbers yourself | The things you eat constantly |
The first three are covered in detail on the AI features page, including exactly what gets sent.
Describe Your Meal
Type or hit the microphone and say it: “two eggs, sourdough toast with butter, and a flat white.” You get back four separate line items — not one lump called “breakfast” — each with its own calories, protein, full nutrition panel, and a note about the portion it assumed.
Every item is editable before it lands in your day, and you can swipe away anything you didn’t actually eat.
Recipe from a Link
Paste a recipe website or a YouTube cooking video. Steady reads the ingredient list — for videos, it uses the description and top comments too, since that’s usually where exact quantities end up — and breaks the whole recipe into ingredients with nutrition for each.
Then it asks the question that actually matters: how many servings did you eat? The recipe knows roughly how many it makes, and a stepper scales every number to the fraction you’re logging. Cook a pot of chili, log one bowl, come back tomorrow and log another.
If a link can’t be read — short-form video is hit-or-miss — Steady says so rather than inventing numbers.
What gets recorded
Every logged food carries a full nutrition panel, not just calories and protein:
carbohydrates · fat (including saturated and trans) · cholesterol · sodium · fiber · sugars (including added) · potassium · calcium · iron
Portion steppers are everywhere. Change the portion and every number scales with it — you never rebuild an entry because you had one and a half servings.
Everything stays editable. Tap any logged food to fix its name, move it to a different meal, change the portion, or correct a single nutrient by hand. Swipe to delete. Changes save immediately.
Calorie-density colors
Every food gets a colored dot, computed locally from calories ÷ grams:
- 🟢 Green — under 1 cal/g. Vegetables, fruit, broth soups, most lean protein. Physically filling for very few calories.
- 🟠 Orange — 1 to 2.4 cal/g. Most cooked dishes, bread, lean meats.
- 🔴 Red — above 2.4 cal/g. Oils, nuts, cheese, chocolate, most snack food. Easy to eat a lot of calories without noticing.
This isn’t a moral ranking — olive oil and almonds are red — it’s a volume signal. When you’re hungry all afternoon on the same calories, the fix is usually shifting the mix greener, not eating less.
The Nutrition Report
Beyond the daily rings, Steady grades the day properly:
- Macro split — how your calories divided across protein, carbs, and fat
- Keep under — sodium, saturated fat, added sugar against FDA reference limits
- Get enough — fiber, protein, potassium, calcium, iron against daily goals
- Density mix — how much of the day was green, orange, and red
- Per-meal breakdown — where the calories actually went
If you’ve opted into blood work tracking, the relevant limits tighten to match the markers you’re trying to move.
Grounding badge
AI estimates run with Google Search enabled, so named restaurant items and branded products get checked against published nutrition rather than guessed at. A badge tells you which happened:
- Looked up (green) — the numbers came from a real source it found
- Best guess (orange) — it estimated from what the food is made of
A best guess is still useful. It just deserves more skepticism, and it’s a hint that a quick portion edit might be worth your time.
Next: AI features →
Steady is a personal project by Hunter Baisden ·
hunter.baisden@gmail.com
Everything you log stays on your iPhone. Read the
privacy policy.