Logging your meals is useful because it helps you to understand how different foods impact your health. Vively uses your meal data to generate personalised insights and scores to help you understand the best diet that's right for your unique needs.
It also helps your dietitian to get a better understanding of your glucose data and how you respond to certain foods.
Today we'll cover:
How to add a food log
Firstly navigate to the: 'Plus' button in the middle of the bottom bar > Add food log
Important: There are multiple ways that you can log your food, so you can choose the system that's right for your needs.
AI Meal Scan
The AI Meal Scan is the first option which appears when you open the food logging function, which allows you to automatically log a meal, complete with ingredients, simply by taking a photo of the meal or uploading an image from your library. You will need to enable camera permissions for this feature to work.
By taking a photo of your meal, Zia uses vision AI to analyse the ingredients in your meal and automatically add them to your food log.
At this stage, the accuracy level is at about 80-90%, so you may need to tweak the ingredients once you've scanned a meal. Accuracy levels may vary. For example, if you take a photo of a burrito, it's not going to be able to know which ingredients are inside the burrito - it will just take a best guess.
If you're in a hurry, you can take a photo of the meal, then click 'Save & Edit Later' and it will automatically generate the meal in the background, so that you don't have to wait.
Barcode Scan
The next way to log a meal or ingredient is by using the Barcode Scan option. This allows you to scan a barcode and extract the ingredients from the item.
Vively has a large database of barcodes, but sometimes we may not have a barcode in our system. In this instance, you're best off to search for that ingredient manually.
AI Describe
Another great way to log your meal is by describing it with voice or text. Using this option, Zia will analyse your description and then create a detailed food log with ingredients for you. This makes it super easy to log meals that you've had in the past.
Add from favourites
Adding from favourites allows you to instantly add the ingredients from your previous favourite meals, making it easy to re-log common meals that you have all the time.
Simply click the heart icon on the top right hand corner on the manual meal log page, find the meal that you want to add, and then once you've added, you can customise the information if you need to.
You can add meals to your favourite meals by going to a specific meal log, and clicking the heart icon on the top right hand corner. You can always view all of your favourite meal logs by clicking the 'View all meal logs' button at the bottom of the track page.
Manual Logging
Finally, we have manual logging, which allows you to manually search and add ingredients from our database. You can also bookmark ingredients so that you can easily access them later, and you can also search from recently used food logs.
If you are unable to find a relevant ingredient from our food database, then you can create custom ingredients, including custom serving sizes and nutritional values.
Once you've added ingredients to your meal log, you can also edit the serving size of those ingredients by clicking the pencil icon, or delete them by clicking the trash icon.
While this is the more time consuming method, it does allow you to create highly accurate food logs.
Why it's important
It's important for a few reasons!
If you're wearing a CGM, after 2 hours have gone by, you'll be able to see your glucose levels and how your body responded to your meal!
We use your food log to calculate your Meal Score which contributes to your Daily Wellness Score. So, if you've logged your meal, you'll be able to match it with your glucose response more easily.
It can help you to identify trends in your meals. For example, you might notice that whenever you have a plain apple for a snack, you get a glucose spike.
It can help your dietitian give you more specific advice based on your unique data
Remember, if logging your meals isn't what is best for you and your mental health at the moment, feel free to skip this component of the app and come back to it when you're in the right head space. It can be exhausting logging every meal, so you might do this periodically.
Or alternatively, you may love doing this daily! You do what suits you.