Why I built a food tracker with no streaks
I'm an engineer, and I made this app for my partner.
They wanted something for tracking calories and protein, but one built for an anxious person. Something they wouldn't latch onto and hyperfocus on in an unhealthy way, but that would let them carry on with their healthy living. Something to log their meals and lean towards healthier prep without judging anyone.
The trackers I looked at all seemed to come with the same features: a streak counter, a daily score, a red number when you go over. My partner wanted a notebook, not a report card.
So I went ahead and built it. I even tried to make it look nice, after a lot of helpful design input from my partner.
A streak is a number that only goes down. You can't grow it by eating well, you can only lose it by missing a day. I believe that is the wrong shape for anything to do with food. A week of careful logging, then a birthday or a holiday, then a zero - and the app treats the holiday as the failure, whilst the week counts for nothing.
For a lot of people that's fine. For my partner, and I suspect for plenty of others, the zero was the reason to stop opening the app, more than anything about the food.
What "no streaks" means in practice
I wrote the rules down early on, and they are still what every change to the app gets checked against:
- Nothing counts your days, so there is nothing to break.
- Miss a day and the app doesn't mention it. It doesn't ask where you were, and nothing counts the gap.
- There is no red state anywhere in it. Going over an aim looks the same as going under.
- Targets are aims, never limits. When you're over, the app never shrinks the meal suggestions to punish you.
That last one took some thought and a few iterations. The easy thing is to make the suggestions "fit" what's left of the day, which sounds helpful until what's left is nothing and the app suggests a rice cake! So the suggestions have a floor and aim to stay sensible whatever the total says.
Ranges instead of one exact number
The other thing I found, whilst building this, is that most trackers aren't as accurate as they look. Nobody knows the exact calories in a slice of toast with peanut butter. What anyone can honestly say is something like 280 to 380, depending on the bread, the spread and how heavy-handed you were. Apps that show one exact number are guessing too - they just hide it.
So Gentle Plate shows the range. When it's less sure, the range gets wider instead of the app pretending. If you'd rather see a single number you can switch that on as a display setting, but it's the same estimate underneath, not a more confident one.
My partner found this really helpful. It takes a lot of the stress off planning exactly how much protein and how many calories you need to eat all the time, and gives you a bit more leeway and flexibility in your day to day eating. Who would have thought that planning a healthy amount of protein could be so exhausting?!
Suggestions, never instructions
Meal ideas lean with the seasons and, if you set it, with your cycle phase. Targets that shift with your cycle, suggestions to match and even rough meal plans were all things my partner was slowly doing already, mostly in a notes app with information scraped together online. Having it all in one app has been really helpful, and so much easier for managing our diets and cycles together.
Obviously, holding more private information like this meant the app had to be as private as I could make it. That was also one of the reasons my partner never wanted to sign up to any of the many period tracking apps already out there. What the app stores, and who can see it, is on the privacy page.
The cycle suggestions are suggestions in the plainest sense: things you might like, given what you've eaten so far and the time of year. The app never tells you what to eat, and nothing in it is medical or dietary advice. If that's what you're after, you'll need to look elsewhere.
Where it's got to
It started life as an Excel sheet, grew into a web app and then an Android app. 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, like a gluten intolerance setting, so the meal prepper plans around them.
That's what made me wonder whether other people might find a use for it too. If a tracker without a streak counter sounds like the one you'd actually keep using, the waitlist is on the front page. One email to confirm it was you, then nothing until your invite.