Logging Your Food Can Get Cumbersome: The upshot of measuring your food is that you’re better at guesstimating when you’re in situations when you can’t (or won’t) measure: out for dinner, at a party, etc. I know about how much steak is 120 grams, and likewise with chicken. I’m pretty sure I know how much salad I ate when I can’t measure. A half of a medium baked potato is around 80 grams. But measuring half a dozen pieces of salami and some bits of brie can get downright fiddly.

Me, inThoughts on Losing 90 Pounds, or Bouncing Along the Bottom

One of the reasons I started counting calories is the first place was not to lose weight, but to understand what I was eating having lost the majority of it. It took me a year to get to 165, and looking back at pictures from that time, that was a good weight for me (I’ve been floating around 155 these days).

I got to 165 by cutting back on intake and increasing my physical activity. But I never measured my food to get there. I suspected, though, that it might be an important maintenance practice.

With that thought in mind, I downloaded FoodNoms shortly into 2024, and started weighing my food. I imagined that I’d be able to use the practice at home to get a sense of what I was eating when I couldn’t measure my food–think restaurants and dinner out with friends. (I won’t pull a scale out of my pocket in a restaurant.) Writing this, I realize how contrary my approach was: I was doing a good job “feeling” my way through it, but longed to understand it numerically.

Indeed, weighing and logging my food and drink helped me absorb some standards that assist with tracking when I can’t measure my food. For example , I’m disciplined about measuring a 100-gram serving of wine to enjoy with dinner. That’s just a bit less than 4 oz. So that’s a good ballpark number for winery visits, 100 grams.

• Cheese is something I love, but it’s calorie-dense. By weighing my apps at home, I noticed that I tend to lop off about five grams of most cheeses. That’s true of cheeses like cheddar, Asiago, and Manchego. Brie, however, finds itself cut off in gooey 12-16 gram bites. And viscous blobs of burrata tend to weight 20 grams or so. A corollary: I will easily eat 10 grams of bread every time I hit the loaf, but the crostini Rhonda makes at home, which I invariably break in half, are five grams.
• Salami is usually 5 grams for a thin slice; thicker preparations are likely closer to 12 grams. Pepperoni is 3-5.
• Peanuts are around a gram a pice, so they’re easy. Almonds are a bit heavier, but they’re easy to count, too.
• I tend to eat 150-200 grams of protein: steak, chicken, or pork
• A banana is probably around 100 grams
• Tiny apples are 100 grams. Like comically small ones. That one you just housed was probably closer to 200.

Sure, you can log repeated five-gram bites of cheese into FoodNoms over a long, leisurely visit to your local winery. Or you can live. Tally to the rescue: this killer utility can eliminate the fiddliness of measuring food on the go.

Tally doesn’t have any opinions about what you count–It’s agnostic in purpose. You can tally good habits, bad habits, weird predilections, annoyances, interruptions, how many times you let the dog out, trips to the loo… Tally has no presets, no specific purpose. It just counts.

So how does food logging shake out on Tally? You create one or more tallies, organized, if you like, into sets, and set the step, reset to, and even a target, for the tally. You can count up or down.

I don’t need to tap a tally 100 times for a glass of wine; each tick of the tally is set to increment by 100. I leave cheese and salami set to increase by a gram at a time. And for spritzes? They’re invariably 6 oz of prosecco and 2 of aperol. So I can just count how many I had, because I don’t vary the recipe.

Tally is an amazingly flexible but focused utility for your iPhone. It only does one thing: count. But you can make it count what you want, any way you want.