MyNetDiary iPhone Tips & Tricks

This short collection of tips and recommendations would help you get the most from MyNetDiary, and also answers to some common questions.
There are many more FAQs and tips available on the Support screen!

Each screen in MyNetDiary also has a Help button, providing help and information specific to the screen.

Table of Contents

Frequently Asked Questions About iPhone App

Most Important Tip

Keep tracking! Learning a new app and starting a food diary may start to seem difficult and time consuming. Please, don't give up, keep tracking!

Firstly, with MyNetDiary tracking gets easier over time, remembering your foods and exercises, taking less of your time. Secondly, from our stats, those who stick around for at least 5 days have excellent chances to achieve their weight goals with MyNetDiary according to their plan! Keep tracking!

Problems and Errors?

PLEASE, if something is missing, not working, or crashing, send us a support request! This will help us figure out what's wrong faster, ask you about additional details, or provide you a workaround.

If you write a review on the App Store, describing the problem, we have no way to get back to you and help you resolve the problem! If, for example, you just write "the app crashes", we would have no idea where or why - it works great for many thousands of other users, and we need your help to understand the problem, to help you better.

Food Entry

First of all, if you are new to MyNetDiary, check out this short video to learn the fastest ways to enter foods!

Entering Servings

Once you have selected the food you need, on the Food Entry screen you can enter the number of servings you ate. MyNetDiary is the most flexible app - most foods have several servings listed and the app remembers your previous entries, so that the next time you can enter amount faster! If you see the amount you need in the list on the right, simply tap it. Otherwise, type the number, e.g. "2", or "1.5", and then tap on the serving type in the list. You can only use the serving types from the list.

MyNetDiary has the fastest and smartest search in the best food database. But you have to make sure you search and select the right food!

For example, if you ate Provolone cheese by Land O'Lakes and search for "provolone cheese", but select in search results "Provolone cheese by Krafts foods", its calories and nutrients would be different from the food label of the cheese you ate. It's a different food and nutrients will be different! When you search and select foods for your food diary, make sure you find what you actually ate. Often, including food vendor name in search helps to narrow down results.

Search and Food Names

MyNetDiary remembers the words you used to search for a food and uses them as your "personal" food name.

This serves two purposes: 1) the food names displayed in the app get shorter and easier to read, 2) the next time you eat the same food, MyNetDiary display it's name at the top as soon as you start typing - this makes food tracking faster for you!

Recipes

Start building a recipe on any meal screen (Breakfast, Lunch, etc), entering foods as usual. Then, tap the recipe button in the bottom toolbar and on the Recipe screen give the recipe a name, and further modify recipe ingredients, if needed.

PhotoFoods Service

As vendors introduce new foods and modify composition of existing foods, some foods might be missing from the food database or become out of date. With MyNetDiary Pro, on iPhones and iPod Touches with camera, you can send us food and nutrition label photos directly from the app. We will add or update the food and enter all nutrients for you!

When you use PhotoFoods, please make sure you searched for the right food. If you send us photo of what you ate, but the food you selected in search does not match, we would not be able to update its nutrients - it's a different food and that would make its nutrients wrong. When you are sending us photos, please make sure that there is no such food in the database and that you selected the right food in search!

Also, you can turn PhotoFoods off on the Custom Food screen and enter all nutrients yourself

Losing more than 2lbs/week

MyNetDiary provides weekly loss rates up to 2 pounds. The reason is that eating less than it takes to lose 2lbs/week may result in some metabolism changes and existing equations stop working and will be inaccurate. If you have your doctor's recommendation, you can override MyNetDiary-calculated calories for 2lbs/week on the Plan screen and enter a smaller number of calories yourself.

Managing Favorites

MyNetDiary includes an intelligent system of favorite foods and exercise, managing them for you, based on your typical eating and exercise patterns. It looks back for a few weeks, checks foods you eat together, checks what you ate recently on the same days of the week, and more. We found that most people prefer this system over manually managing favorites. If you see that this system does not work well for you, please help us understand why do you think so, what's not working for you. We might be able to improve the system, or implement a manual system.

More meals in a day

Sometimes, we get asked about adding more meals in a day. The problem is that not everyone needs many meals a day, and making it generic would result in too many meal sections to easily navigate between. MyNetDiary has a good alternative - tracking time of foods you eat between main meals in the Snacks section. Once you do that, the Nutrition Report (available on the Meals screen) will separate and sort snacks by time - you will see new meals there "Before breakfast", "Before Lunch" and so on. You can use the Settings screen to enable food time tracking. You can also select "Pre-populate" option and fine-tune "Entry Delay", which is the typical time between eating and entering foods.

Tracking blood glucose

It's available in the special Diabetes Tracking App or in any MyNetDiary app for MyNetDiary Premium users. The diabetes tracker adds comprehensive tracking of blood glucose, insulin, medications, and many other parameters. It also provides special charts and reports important for people interested in tracking carbs and managing diabetes and pre-diabetes.

If you are a MyNetDiary Premium subscriber, diabetes tracking is already included both online and in the free iPhone app. Make sure to sign in with your Premium account name!

Including Vitamins into daily totals

The vitamins, supplements, and medications screen logs just free text notes, with some extra features. If you would like to include vitamin supplements into your daily vitamin totals, you should create them as custom foods (or, as some vitamins already exist in the food database, find and enter them).

The number/grade on Nutrition Facts screen

This is a Food Score, typically between 5 for more healthful foods and -5 for foods that are considered not very healthful. Food Score may also be displayed as a Food Grade - from "A" to "D", making it easier to remember and interpret at a glance than numbers.

Entering food nutrients manually

We offer the PhotoFood Service to save your time, entering all nutrients for you. If you prefer to enter food nutrients yourself - it's very easy, just switch PhotoFoods into the OFF position - you will see all the nutrient fields!

Using barcode scanner

Most importantly, make sure to hold your iPhone steady and have good lighting. Once a food is found and its food label displayed, you can select this food to add.

If UPC is not found, you can search by typing food name. If you found the food with search and added to your diary, its UPC will be remembered for the next time.

With MyNetDiary PRO, you can also use PhotoFood service and include barcode scan. We will process and add or update the food for you, including its UPC.

Joining MyNetDiary Community

We always recommend getting connected with MyNetDiary on Facebook to get the latest news, read and share success stories, and also joining MyNetDiary Community - a friendly place where you can team up with other people to get support, keep your motivation high and build long-term dieting accountability.