Log what you ate, the way you eat

Search, scan, or take a picture

The food catalog covers single ingredients, common cooked dishes and a growing list of branded items, and searching it is free. Raw and cooked are separate entries: "chicken breast raw" and "chicken breast cooked" carry different macros per gram, so a recipe built from raw weights and a plate weighed after cooking both come out right.

Scan a packaged food's barcode and its nutrition comes from Open Food Facts or USDA FoodData Central. Or photograph a meal: an AI vision model reads it and returns an editable draft. Nothing goes into your log until you confirm it, so a misread photo can't add a meal you didn't eat.

Recipes and saved meals log as one thing

Build a recipe once from its ingredients and MuscleBuddy calculates its calories and macros per serving. Saved recipes appear in food search and the meal plan generator next to single foods, and the macros scale with the serving size.

Log a saved recipe and the entry keeps the recipe's macros and micronutrients as they were when you logged it. Edit or delete the recipe later and days you already logged stay as they were. Eat half a portion and it scales.

Religious, cultural and personal food rules

Set a dietary framework (halal, kosher, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Seventh-day Adventist, Rastafari, or one you define) at the strictness you choose. Search and the logger still return every food, each with a badge: excluded, not excluded, or needs certification. Whether meat is halal or kosher depends on slaughter and supervision that an ingredient list can't show, so MuscleBuddy says certification is needed instead of guessing. Only the meal plan generator filters by framework; the logger records whatever you ate.

Giving something up for a while is tracked separately, as an abstention with a start and end date: Lent, a dry January, or no bread until a wedding. Presets cover the common ones, and Lent's dates are worked out from Easter each year. Log an excluded food during an abstention and you get a short note naming it and the end date. Nothing scores your adherence, and the abstention ends on its date without you switching it off.

Micronutrients and filling the gaps

Beyond calories and macros, MuscleBuddy tracks the fat breakdown (saturated, unsaturated, trans, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated) and vitamin and mineral coverage. When your last 30 days of logs run short on a nutrient, it suggests foods and your own recipes ranked by how much of that gap one serving closes, within your macro plan. A shortfall in what you logged is a food suggestion, not a diagnosis.

Logging works offline, in a gym basement or on a plane, and syncs when you have signal again.

Where your food log goes

Your food log feeds your nutrition ranks and your analytics, and the foods in it carry the prices behind your cost-per-gram-of-protein figures. Your calorie targets move off your weigh-ins, not your food log. If a medication in your stack affects appetite, such as a GLP-1 agonist, Nutrition shows a note about it beside your intake.