About

I am an engineer who has been enjoying building different apps, games, sites and agents with AI coding tools over the past year or so. I have mostly been building things for myself and possibly boring my partner about all these 'cool' things I've been making - until my partner mentioned that they wouldn't mind an app for something to help with them also. They wanted an app for tracking calories and protein - but an anxiety-friendly one, something to log our meals and lean us towards healthier prep without judging anyone.

For most of this year we'd been adjusting our meals around their cycle - period and cycle dates tracked by hand in our calendar, meal prep following whatever good advice we could find for each phase. As a male-presenting person I found the whole thing eye-opening: there is so little solid information out there, and I found it super interesting. Who would have thought cutting sugar and caffeine could help so much!

I made this app for my partner - I immediately went on to design everything we had already been doing and things we wanted the app to be able to do + how we wanted it to look and feel - as you may imagine, I got really excited finally building something for someone other than myself!

So I went ahead and built it. It started life as an Excel sheet, grew into this web app and then an Android app. Getting it onto the Play Store is the goal after that.

Since then it has picked up ways to log by text, photo, recipe link or barcode scan, and the calorie and protein targets now shift with your cycle. Seeing my partner (and myself) use it every day has been really rewarding, and I've started adding things with other family members in mind - a gluten intolerance setting, ingredients you don't like - so the meal prepper plans around them. That's what made me wonder whether other people might find a use for it too.

This app is not an accurate calorie or protein tracker -- in fact I found out, whilst working on this app, most other calorie trackers aren't as accurate as they look - they just try to look or sound like it! It's actually quite difficult being accurate in calorie, protein, fat estimates of what you are eating unless you are happy to properly spend time and tracking things unit by unit.

This app is not intended to give medical advice or dieting suggestions - if that is what you are after, you may need to look elsewhere.

It made more sense building something that is honest and lets its users know its estimate range.

I've built this over several months and iterations using AI coding tools, design tools and a lot of testing. It's been helpful both of us actually using it and taking notes whenever we didn't like something, wanted improvements or new features added etc and then adding those to my never ending backlog of things to add to this!

It's also been helpful coming from a software development background, especially coming from QA as this app was built with privacy and security in mind. I am fully aware of how many vibe coded apps there are available these days and it's a security nightmare for most!

The app uses some LLM models for some of the estimates but I've made sure to keep most of the logic in code and only give the LLM a small section of the task to interpret itself. The model turns your text or photo into a list of foods and portions, then the code looks each one up in a food index and does the arithmetic. The model's own numbers are only kept when nothing matches.

The models chosen have been set with a Zero Data Retention Policy (ZDR) which basically means that the provider won't keep the prompt after answering and it won't be used for training the model either - this was done as a means to keep things as private as possible.

You can always reach me at [email protected]. I'm always happy to answer any question where I can and help out where possible.

There is also a feedback box in the app settings to reach out, give any suggestions or improvements you might like, or for reporting any bugs or issues.

Appreciate you reading this and hope you enjoy using the app and it helps you as much as it has helped my partner (and myself)!