Lean Me

Consistently logging everything in your diet takes some getting used to, and inevitably leads to two conclusions. First, it works. Counting Calories will bring you as close as you could possibly come to combining the words weight loss and mathematical certainty. Second, you want it to be as efficient as possible, which means having the right tools for the job. Specifically – a handy kitchen scale, your iPhone or iPod touch, and Lean Me Pro.

Lean Me comes preloaded with over 28,000* food items, each of which has its own custom list of serving sizes (while common in other programs, Lean Me does not include a fixed list of serving sizes, as doing so requires assumptions about food density which introduce unnecessary error into the data). The stock database includes data for approximately 20,000 common US foods, 4,500 common UK foods, and the food data for over 50 US restaurant chains.

You can also create unlimited custom food entries in Lean Me, each with its own unique list of serving sizes. You could create a single pretzel food, for example, including serving sizes of 1 pretzel, 1 snack pack, 4 ounces, 12 pretzels, etc., each denominated in a common base unit that you choose (generally grams or ounces). Like all other foods in the database, the custom entries are fully searchable either via full text search, or by the food group you assign them to.

Your most recently logged food items will always appear at the top of the all foods section, meaning you often won’t have to search for them at all. The recents list is filtered in real time when typing in the search bar, and you can tap Search on the keyboard to query the entire database. Full database search results adapt to your usage history, bringing your more commonly eaten foods to the top of the search results list. When you choose a food to log, you may also see suggestions for other foods to log based on your logging history. Lean Me also remembers the last serving size and quantity of servings eaten for each food in the database, as well as the meal type of the last diet log created, making logging as quick and convenient as possible.

In Lean Me you can group multiple foods together into cards, which could represent a dish or an entire meal. Lean Me remembers the default meal type of each card, as well as the default quantity for each ingredient in the card, which can be changed before logging the card on any given day. You can also log only a portion of a card if, for example, it represents a dish that you prepared for multiple people or for more than one sitting. And if you would prefer to log the dish or meal as one food rather than a collection of ingredients, Lean Me has a built-in option to let you convert the entire card into a single food item.

*We have researched competing datasets with up to 100,000+ foods, but found three major problems that leave us confident in the strengths of the Lean Me food database. 1.) Most include separate food entries for each serving size of the same food. This drastically simplifies the programming required, but the result is an overstatement of the database size by approximately 300% on average. Lean Me has separate food entries per serving size solely where the data exists only as such in its original form, usually in restaurant data. 2.)  The number of duplicate entries for precisely the same food, independent of serving size, increases exponentially in the “larger” food databases. 3.) While errors are inevitable, we found that not only the number of data errors, but also the rate of data errors increased sharply in the larger databases, even among the non-duplicated food items.

While the Lean Me food database is large, we understand the appeal of even larger databases. However, we believe that using the word “Pro” in our name obligates us to balance size with quality. That being said, we will never be too proud to make Lean Me better, and will continue to add reliable data when available.