What a calorie counter app should do in a kitchen, not a spreadsheet

Five ways into the diary

Barcode is the default for anything with a GTIN. Point the camera at the code, confirm the serving, assign breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack. Logging is free. Cook EZ caches the product so repeat yogurts do not depend on a live Open Food Facts round trip. If the serving on the FDA Nutrition Facts label in your hand disagrees with the database serving, change the grams. The label you are holding is the batch you bought.

Search hits the local food index, seeded from USDA FoodData Central generics and from products you have already scanned. "Chicken, broiler, meat only, roasted" is a different food from "chicken, broiler, meat and skin, fried." Pick the cook method. Quick-add is a gram box for people who already weighed. Recipe log is the per-serving card times servings eaten, including a 1.5 if you went back for another half bowl. Plate photo is the vision path for mixed meals without a barcode.

Repeat and recent items should be the majority of weekday logs after week two. If every lunch is a new photo analysis, the friction will win. Save the usual bowl. The Cook Journal can still take a new photo for the streak grid. The diary can reuse the food.

Targets start from TDEE, then you choose a direction

TDEE is total daily energy expenditure: basal metabolism plus activity plus the small thermic effect of food. Cook EZ's calorie calculator uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation for resting energy (PubMed 2305711), then an activity multiplier. That resting piece was published as a predictive equation for resting energy expenditure. It is a population fit. Your thyroid, your fidgeting, your job on your feet, and your training block will disagree with it. Use it as a first budget, then watch weekly weight or how clothes fit over three to four weeks, not over a Tuesday.

A target below TDEE is a deficit. A target near TDEE is maintenance. A target above is a surplus. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans discuss healthy dietary patterns, not a single magic calorie number. Protein, fiber, and food groups still matter if the kcal box is satisfied with soda. The macro calculator on this site splits a calorie target into protein, carbohydrate, and fat grams for planning. The diary then shows how a day landed.

Guardrails exist because very low targets are a safety problem. The app will not cheer a 900 kcal prescription for an adult. If a clinician gave you a specific energy prescription, that prescription wins. Cook EZ is a cooking and logging tool. It is not medical care.

Why two apps disagree on the same sandwich

Databases differ. FoodData Central, branded product labels, restaurant PDFs, and user-generated entries in other apps are four different sources. A "turkey sandwich" can be 320 kcal or 740 kcal depending on bread grams, cheese, and mayonnaise. Cook EZ prefers FDC generics and OFF/label packaged foods, plus your recipe cards. It does not scrape a random user's "healthy sandwich" from another platform.

Serving size language is a second fight. The FDA Nutrition Facts label defines serving size from Reference Amounts Customarily Consumed, which may not match what you ate. Dual-column labels show per serving and per package. Log what went in your mouth. If you ate the whole pint, log the whole pint. The "serving" on the label is a legal amount, not a moral amount.

Water weight after cooking is a third fight. Rice, pasta, beans, and oats change gram weight with water. Logging 80 g dry rice as 80 g cooked rice undercounts energy by a large factor. FoodData Central has cooked and uncooked entries. Match the state to the scale. If you do not have a scale, use cooked household measures and accept a wider error bar.

Cook, then log the servings you ate

The useful calorie app for a home cook is the one that already knows the recipe. Generate in Cook EZ, scale the pot, cook in Cook Mode, then log 1 of 4 servings or 2 of 4. The nutrition on the card is built from the same FDC-style ingredients as a manual log, with the oil the recipe specified. If you poured more oil than the card, add it. If you skipped the cheese, remove it. The diary is editable on purpose.

Leftovers are the same recipe on a later day. FSIS says refrigerate within 2 hours, use within 3 to 4 days, reheat to 165 °F. Log them when you eat them. Do not log the whole pot on Sunday night "to get it over with" unless you ate the whole pot. Future-you will either double-count or skip, and the week will look like a heart attack or a fast.

Restaurant meals can be a plate photo plus edits, or a search plus a humble guess. Prefer the photo if the plate is in front of you. Prefer a labeled kids' menu PDF only if you actually ordered that item and ate that portion. USDA Keep Food Safe still applies to the doggy bag: two-hour rule, then the leftover window.

Barcodes, Open Food Facts, and cache-first lookup

Open Food Facts is a crowdsourced product database. Quality varies. A well-maintained yogurt with a photographed label is a gift. A crowd-edited soda with the wrong serving is a trap. Compare to the package. If the package changed formulation, the old OFF row may lag. Your eyes on the FDA label win.

Cook EZ is cache-first for barcodes. A GTIN to product record is treated as stable. That design keeps the diary fast and keeps the live API from becoming a bottleneck. If a scan misses, you can still search FDC generics or quick-add. You can also photograph the Nutrition Facts panel as a last resort and enter grams by hand. The camera path for mixed plates is not an OCR engine for tiny label type. Use the barcode scanner for codes.

International packs may show kJ instead of kcal, or per 100 g only. Convert. 1 kcal is 4.184 kJ. Per 100 g times your grams divided by 100 is the portion. The unit converter on this site is for kitchen units (cups, grams, ounces). Energy conversion is this arithmetic. Do not mix them up and "convert" a cup of flour into calories without a density.

What a calorie counter will not do

It will not measure your TDEE. Only a lab or a long trend plus honest logging approximates it. It will not see the oil in the restaurant broccoli unless you add it. It will not make a 1200 kcal target safe because the UI looks calm. It will not diagnose a deficiency. The Dietary Guidelines and a clinician cover pattern and medical questions. The diary covers "what I ate, as best I logged."

It will not replace allergen management. Logging "2 tbsp soy sauce" does not tell you if that bottle contained wheat. If you have a wheat allergy, you already know to read the bottle. The calorie app might even encourage you to log a sauce you should not have eaten. Keep those jobs separate. Generate with allergies on. Log food you actually consumed. Verify labels every time. AI can miss wheat in sauces.

It will not need a perfect day. A diary with 80 percent of meals logged for a month teaches more than three perfect days and a two-week hole. Use plate photos when you would otherwise skip. Use barcodes when they exist. Use recipe servings when you cooked from the app.

A weekly review that stays in the kitchen

Once a week, look at protein average, not only kcal average. If protein is consistently low and you wanted it higher, generate high-protein dinners for the next three nights instead of buying a powder you will not mix. If weekend oil is the entire surplus, write a note on Friday: measure the olive oil, or switch one restaurant meal to a recipe you already have.

Insights in the app are trends, not verdicts. Sodium spikes after a takeout week. Fiber drops when bread is the vegetable. None of that requires a speech. It requires a shopping list. The shopping-list habit (or generating from pantry photos) is how a calorie app becomes a cooking app again.

If the scale and the diary disagree for three weeks in the same direction, believe the trend and move the target by a small step (about 150 to 250 kcal), or move activity. Do not delete Tuesday's rice to force the math to match a number you liked in January.

Questions

Sources

• Mifflin-St Jeor equation (PubMed 2305711)
• USDA FoodData Central
• FDA, Nutrition Facts Label
• Open Food Facts
• Dietary Guidelines for Americans
• USDA, Keep Food Safe
• USDA FSIS, Leftovers and Food Safety