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. You can also create your own Custom Foods and Recipes. Another way is to pick a food from one of My Foods lists collecting your favorites as well as any previously logged foods.

Instant Food Search finds matching foods immediately after you start typing food name. It shows the most popular foods and your recently logged foods at the top.

The rest of this page describes techniques of effective food search.

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 before and shows up to 5 recent matching food 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.

Extending Catalog

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.

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.

Video Recommended

A short Food Entry Video shows Food Search and logging in action: