Goals · Cutting Ultra-Processed Food
See how much of your week is ultra-processed, without the moralising
This is a subject that goes wrong in a predictable way: it starts as a reasonable interest in cooking more and turns into a moral category system where some food is clean and the rest of it is a failure. That version helps nobody, and there's decent evidence it does real harm to people already prone to anxiety about eating. The useful version is duller. Most people have no idea what their actual proportion is, it's usually concentrated in one or two specific slots in the week, and finding out which is a practical problem with a practical answer.
For people who want less of it without turning food into a purity contest.
Why this is hard to keep track of
- The topic attracts moralising, and moralising is how people end up lying to a log
- The definition is genuinely fuzzy at the edges, so any score is false precision
- Convenience food clusters in specific slots, and nobody knows which without data
- Cooking from scratch fails at exactly the moments a week gets hard, unrecorded
Worth recording
- What you ate, in plain words. Packet or not is usually obvious
- Whether it was cooked, assembled, bought ready, or delivered
- Which days it clusters on, which is nearly always the tired ones
- What the week was like, since that predicts more than intention does
Cadence
A sentence a meal. The categorising is not your job
What progress looks like
A truthful proportion across a normal few weeks, and the two or three slots where nearly all of it actually sits.
In practice
Say it once, or photograph it
The entries most worth having are the ones made at the exact moment nobody wants to fill in a form. A sentence — typed, dictated, or replaced entirely by a photo of the plate — is a much lower bar, and it carries the context a calorie field would have thrown away.
Called 4 tools
log_meal(items: ["cereal"], meal: "breakfast")log_meal(items: ["supermarket sandwich"], meal: "lunch")log_meal(items: ["ready meal"], meal: "dinner", prep: "reheated")compare_periods(group_by: "weekday", tag: "convenience")
Every figure here was counted from entries you made. The model chose which tools to call — it doesn't score the meal, estimate calories from a photo, or decide what any of it says about you.
And then ask
The question the log can answer
Months of entries hold real answers to the things you've been guessing at, and reading them properly has always meant a spreadsheet and a free evening — which is exactly what nobody has.
Ask in plain language. The answers come back with the counts behind them, including when those counts are too thin to mean anything yet — which is the more useful answer far more often than people expect.
Called 3 tools
get_history(topic: "less-ultra-processed", window: "6m")find_pattern(group_by: "context")compare_periods(metric: "entries")
Counts and averages over your own entries, nothing more. Where the data is confounded or too thin, the answer says so instead of rounding it into a conclusion.
What it does
Set up around cutting ultra-processed food
The same mechanics as everything else here, pointed at what actually matters for this one.
A sentence or a photo per meal
No database lookup and no calorie box. The log that gets kept beats the log that was more precise for eleven days.
Trends, not days
Weight moves a couple of kilos on water alone. Everything here is read as a weekly trend, because the daily number is mostly noise and reads as failure on a perfectly good week.
What the good weeks had in common
The useful question isn't what you ate on Tuesday, it's what was different about the months that went somewhere. That's a query against your own record, and it's the one worth asking.
Your goal, not one we set
We don't calculate a target for you. Any number an app produces here is a population average wearing your name, and it will be wrong by enough to matter.
A bad week is a data point
Nothing resets and nothing is undone. A week off is information about what makes a week hard, which is considerably more useful than a broken chain.
Exportable from day one
Everything you've logged, photos included, out in a file you can take to a dietitian, a GP, or somewhere else entirely.
The reason a lot of people start
Something to actually bring to the appointment
You get fifteen minutes, and the first question is always some version of "so what does a normal week look like?" — which nobody on earth can answer accurately from memory.
What this gives you: A realistic picture of a normal week, which is more useful to anyone advising you than a description of how you eat when you're doing well.
- Export the date range you were asked about, as a file you can print
- Photos alongside the entries, which say more than any description
- Counts and timings rather than an impression of the worst week
- Nothing shared anywhere unless you choose to share it
What it won't do
- Score a meal, or sort food into good and bad
- Estimate calories from a photo and present the guess as a number
- Set you a calorie target, a macro target, or a weight
- Run a streak you can break, or tell you that you've fallen behind
- Comment on your body. The photos here are of food
- Diagnose anything, or suggest that a pattern is a diagnosis
It's a notebook that can do arithmetic and answer questions about itself. Deciding what any of it means is a job for you and the people advising you.
Early access
Start with what you're already trying to hold in your head
Tell us what you've been trying to keep track of and we'll set it up with you — recording the thing that's actually useful, at a cadence that survives a bad week.
- Founding accounts lock their price for life
- No card, no trial clock, no notification designed to make you feel behind
- Export everything you've logged, photos included, whenever you want
Also here
The rest of the picture
These overlap constantly, which is the point — the answer to a question about one of them is very often sitting in another one's data.
Losing Weight
A line per meal when you can manage it, and a weigh-in when you want one
Keeping Weight Steady
Much lighter than you're used to. A few entries a week is plenty
Gaining Weight
A tick per meal. The detail is optional, the meal isn't
Eating More Protein
A sentence per meal. No weighing, no packets
Eating More Vegetables
Part of the meal sentence. Nothing extra to do
Steadier Energy
Meals plus one number in the afternoon
Eating Regular Meals
Three ticks a day at most. The lowest-effort log on the site
Keep the record without it becoming another job
Founding pricing is locked for accounts opened during early access.
Founding accounts lock their price for life. No card required.