Log a meal in plain language

Two in the afternoon. You finish your plate, push it aside, and pull out your phone before the post-lunch fog hits. You didn't follow the diet plan exactly — there was a side salad you didn't plan for, and the rice was a generous serving. The question is how to log it without opening a food picker, scrolling through a list, or doing the math on the macros.

What the agent needs to hear

Behind your sentence, the agent is working backwards to four pieces of information: which meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack), what was on the plate, how much of each, and when you ate it. You don’t have to spell every one out. Time of day fills in the meal type most of the time, and “today” is the default unless you say otherwise. But if the meal is unusual for the hour, or you’re logging something from earlier, naming it explicitly removes guesswork: « log this as lunch even though it’s 4 pm » lands cleanly.

For the items themselves, keep the natural names — « chicken », « rice », « salad ». The agent searches your catalog by what you said and shows the matches in a card before saving. It doesn’t need a brand, a barcode, or a precise variety unless you have multiple variations and want to disambiguate (« the basmati, not the jasmine »).

Portions and defaults

When you don’t give a number, the agent assumes a sensible portion for the food and the meal type: a serving of chicken at lunch is treated as typical, rice gets a side-portion estimate. These defaults exist so the log isn’t blocked on you weighing things, but they’re conservative — if you actually weighed something, say so: « 180 g chicken, 200 g cooked rice ». Numbers always override defaults, and units stick: grams stay grams, « a cup » gets converted, « a handful » gets a reasonable guess.

If the meal had a repeat structure — your usual breakfast smoothie, the lunchbox you packed twice this week — mention it by name (« my usual post-workout shake ») and the agent pulls the saved version instead of resolving each ingredient one by one. Faster, and consistent across days.

When the match looks wrong

The card the agent shows you before saving is the moment to catch a bad match. If « chicken » got resolved to breaded chicken when you had it grilled, correct it in plain language: « the chicken should be grilled, not breaded ». If a quantity is off, say the right one — you don’t need to point at the row: « the rice was 200 g ». You’re not editing fields, you’re talking; the agent finds the line and updates it.

If the agent can’t find a food at all — something new you haven’t logged before — it asks. Describe it (« it was a protein bar, RXBar, peanut butter ») and it gets looked up in the shared catalog or saved as a custom entry for next time.

What you can leave out

You don’t need a diet plan to log a meal. You don’t need to pre-create the meal type, the day, or anything else — the agent creates the log on the spot and attaches everything to it. If you happen to be on a plan and the meal matches a planned slot, it gets tagged that way for adherence. If it doesn’t, off-plan meals count toward your daily totals the same as planned ones; they just don’t move adherence numbers.

What makes the log worth keeping

Three things decide whether this log helps you later: the meal type is right (so daily structure stays clean), the foods are the ones you actually ate (so the macros are real), and the portions are honest — not exact, but honest. The system reads these logs for daily totals, weekly reviews, streaks, and adherence scoring; vague portions are fine, but invented foods or wrong meal types corrupt the signal. Say what you ate in the words you’d use to a friend, adjust the card before you nod, and that’s the whole loop.