Finding Foods
You have to find a food you ate, then log it to your diary. Food Search and Barcode Scanner are the most common ways to do this.
Once you tap the green "+" button on the Meals screen, you will see search in the main food database. Instant food search will find matching foods immediately after you start typing food name. It shows the most popular foods and your recently logged foods at the top.
To save you time, foods you eat frequently are automatically displayed below the search bar (until you start typing search words), so may be you won't need searching at all.
Besides search in the main food database, MyNetDiary provides a few more catalogs: your favorite foods, custom foods, recipes, My Meals, recent meals, and PhotoFoods. Make sure to scroll from the right to see them!
You can also create your own Custom Foods, recipes, and My Meals while searching, or you can use Manage Foods screen to add and update such foods.
Add Keywords
You can find and log your basic foods faster by typing additional keywords next to food name. For example:
- milk search finds more than 10,000 foods
- whole milk search has 1,500 results
- whole milk horizon search brings up less than 10 items to choose from
Tip 1: Type in restaurant, brand or vendor name to narrow down your search.
Tip 2: Type the words in any order.
Tip 3: Try typing beginning of the words, e.g. pea yog gree input brings up all kinds of Greek peach yogurt. Type at least 3 first letters from every significant word in food name.
Raw, Cooked and more
To quickly find a fresh fruit or vegetable, simply add the word raw to your fruit or vegetable, e.g. raw orange. Another special word is cooked, which can be added to vegetables, meats etc.
Tips for Finding Basic and Staple Food Items article helps finding fruit, veggies, meats, fish/seafood, poultry, grains and pasta (and their cooked variations).
Recent Foods with Short Names
MyNetDiary remembers the foods you have logged earlier and shows up to 5 recent matching foods at the top of the result list (highlighted with blue color):
MyNetDiary remembers short food name as you entered it and shows your short food name instead of full catalog name. For example, the screenshot above shows Whole milk, which is user’s short name for the full name "Milk whole 3.25% milkfat".
You will also see recent foods with short names in My Foods collections.
Tip: If you don’t want to see some of your recents at the top of search results, select Remove from Search History menu item in My Foods.
Creating New Foods
When you don’t find a food in the catalog, create Custom Food or Recipe.
Tip: If you don’t have Nutrition Facts for your custom food or recipe ingredient, search the web while adding calories in to food name. For, example, see the results for calories in summer squash.
Staple Foods Catalog - Alternative to Search for Basic Foods
Another way to find basic food staples for logging and cooking recipes is to use Staple Foods catalog. MyNetDiary hand-picked about 900 staple food items and organized them into food groups.
For instance, if you tap "Vegetables - Raw or Frozen" you will see common staple foods in alphabetical order: artichokes raw, arugula or rocket raw, asparagus raw, avocados raw, etc.
See Is There An Easier Way to Log Your Basic Foods? blog entry to learn more about staple foods.
Quick Calories
You can simply log calories without finding a food. Many people lose weight by planning and tracking calories only. Please be advised that logging Quick Calories disables nutrient planning and analysis required for a healthy diet.
Use the Quick Calories tab while logging foods to log quick calories.
Learning MyNetDiary iPhone App Videos
If you haven't seen it yet, we recommend checking out MyNetDiary's YouTube channel, it has a special playlist Learning MyNetDiary iPhone App covering search, logging, recipes, favorites, and a ton of customization settings.
Please notice that this is a playlist, with many short videos. Use the playlist button in the corner of the video box to select any video from the playlist.