Friendly Food Tracker is an application for tracking what you eat as easily as possible. Diets are hard enough and convenience is king, so it’s our mission to remove as many blockers as possible that stop you hitting your weight goals.
I’ve decided just to release the prototype ‘as-is’ for us to gather feedback and it’s available either as a free web application and even better - as a WhatsApp application.
Friendly Food Tracker is essentially a chatbot application. Yes, yes, I know there’s a bit of a hype train around chatbots just now because of ChatGPT but it’s just such a good tried and tested interface! So much of our phone usage is spent sending messages, so it makes sense to build where the convenience is.
You know that problem of searching for and weighing potatoes that you had before on previous food tracking apps? Imagine how much easier it would be to just send an sms saying you ate potatoes, veg and fish and that’s it! The tracking of the food categories is all done for you. That's what Friendly Food Tracker does.
There’s also another problem with food tracking apps and to be honest, dieting in general, that's never really sat well with me; calorie counting.
Calorie restriction creates such a negative mindset. Why not celebrate a healthy, well balanced diet instead?
Besides that, do we really need to know our calories to the nth degree? Instead of being so granular, Friendly Food Tracker acts like a mirror for your diet and lets you know if your diet is healthy or unhealthy. If it’s unhealthy then we can work with you to make the necessary changes but we don’t do calorie tracking.
How do we do this?
Friendly Food Tracker uses a scoring mechanism called Diet Quality (DQS) that was introduced by author and nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald in his book "Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance" which assigns a numerical value assigned to a person's diet based on its nutritional quality.
This score is used as a measure of how healthy a person's diet is rather than the traditional method of counting calories.
With DQS, foods are categorised into different food groups with around half being ‘High Quality’ and the remainder being ‘Low Quality’. Whenever you eat foods of high quality, you’ll be awarded points. Similarly whenever you eat lower quality foods, points will be deducted.
The scoring takes into account the number of servings you have of the food categories each day and points can vary. For example, Fruits are classified as High Quality but by the fifth serving, the points awarded will have dropped from two to zero.
Where DQS really stands out over calorie counting is its simplicity. Using DQS we don't need to weigh food or fret over specific quantities. Instead, we simply track the type of food.
So there you have it, between a super-simple chatbot interface and a no-nonsense, easy food scoring system, Friendly Food Tracker makes it easy to track your food as easily as texting your friends.
Chris.
Founder, Friendly Food Tracker
