Nate's Food Browser - easily add new foods

[Nate-S]

Hi guys, I've been trying to track my food intake, but found it difficult to add new food items. Eg, I ate a homemade tuna pasta, but none of the premade foods match this. I can add a custom food to Fitbit, but this requires me to add up all the numbers for the tuna, pasta, and tomato sauce and enter them. There has to be a better way!

What are you guys using to track the food you eat? I looked around but other software I found had the same problem -- adding foods was too simplistic. I'm a software engineer, so I spent the past few days whipping up a little tool. It lets you search for any number of foods, then gives you the totals to enter into Fitbit. I even hooked it up to the Fitbit API so you don't have to type the numbers, just click Upload and it adds a new food on your Fitbit account.

You can try out the tool here:

http://esotericsoftware.com/temp/food.jar

It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You'll need to have Java installed.

Using the tool should be self explanatory, I hope. Search for food items, or enter the numbers on the right. Name and add items at the bottom. Switch to the Foods tab and create a new food, then Upload to Fitbit. Hover over things for tooltips, F1 to disable/enable tooltips.

The tool handles conversions. Here in Europe all the foods list their numbers for 100g, even if the serving size is less. So, enter 100g, then fill in the numbers, then when you change 100g to the number of grams you ate, it'll convert the numbers for you.

I made this tool for myself and my wife, but I thought I'd share it here to see if you guys find it useful. Any feedback you might have is welcome! I've considered working on it more, eg I'd like to hook it up to more and better food databases so I can search for "phad thai" and get nutritional numbers I can use. Currently it uses the USDA database.

Edit: I've started actually using the tool. There are a few quirks and I've taken notes of a couple bugs, but it is working pretty well for me! Some screenshots:

Here are those foods uploaded to Fitbit:

[SunsetRunner]

Hi Nate - this is great, and great just as it is.

However, if you have time, please make whatever improvements you like.

I put a shortcut on my desktop to the downloaded file.

Would be great if it was a program that showed up in the program list.

[Nate-S]

Thanks for trying it out. You can always drag a shortcut into your start menu or dock. The biggest improvement would be to update an existing food or delete a food. Currently Fitbit doesn't allow that.

Edit: I fixed a few minor bugs. Just download the file again to get the latest.

[SunsetRunner]

I can add, modify and delete "private foods" ...

[SunsetRunner]

It would be handy if the program also allowed the addition of single generic food items,

since Fitbit has available an unnecessary overabundance of brand name restaurant foods.

[Nate-S]

You can add, edit, and delete private foods through the Fitbit website, but Fitbit does not allow 3rd party applications to edit or delete them, only to add. This means once you upload a food from my tool and use it in your food log, you'll have to edit it on the Fitbit site from then on. If you upload again, you'll have created a second, separate food (which will be confusing if they have the same name). This is not good and severely limits the usefulness of using a 3rd party tool to manage foods in Fitbit. Fitbit should want to facilitate that, because it increases the value of their platform. It seems they have just overlooked exposing the API calls.

You can add a single, generic food item. Just create a food in my tool with one item and click Upload.