🔢Calories and macros for a whole week, without tracking anything
Food diaries fail because they ask you to log a meal you already ate. Counting the plan instead of the plate changes the arithmetic.
Every food diary asks the same thing: remember what you ate, then type it in. It works for about eleven days. The information arrives too late to change anything, and the logging is a chore attached to a meal that's already over.
If you've already written down what you're going to cook, the arithmetic can run the other way. The recipes are known, the quantities are known, the number of people is known. Nutrition stops being something you record and becomes something the plan already implies — visible before you shop, when it can still change a decision.
Where the numbers come from
The part worth being fussy about is the source. Nutrition is never guessed from an ingredient's name: each ingredient you want counted is linked to an entry in a real food database sourced from the USDA catalogue, which stores facts per 100 g plus a set of known portions. An ingredient with no link simply isn't counted — it doesn't get an invented value.
From an ingredient to a day's total
- Your quantity is converted to grams, because the facts are stored per 100 g.
- The per-100 g figures are scaled to those grams, summed across ingredients, and divided by the number of servings.
- Recipe totals roll up into a meal, and meals into a day — so you read calories and macros per serving, per meal and per day.
- Change the servings and every figure re-scales live, without re-entering anything.
An estimate that admits it's an estimate
Converting "a bunch of parsley" to grams isn't always exact. When any step in the chain has to fall back to a coarse grams-per-unit guess, the whole total is flagged as an estimate rather than shown as a confident number. If something isn't linked or can't be converted, the app says the total is incomplete and why. A number that tells you how much to trust it is worth more than a precise-looking one that doesn't.
Doing the linking once
Linking every ingredient by hand would be its own chore, so it isn't required: ingredients can be matched automatically, and previously linked foods are recalled instantly the next time the same name appears. A batch ingredient editor clusters the same ingredient across all your recipes — "tomato", "Tomatoes", "pomodoro" — so you rename, categorise and link it once instead of recipe by recipe.
Source and disclaimer
Nutrition data comes from USDA FoodData Central (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service), a public-domain database. Values are estimates, computed with automatic unit conversions, provided for informational purposes only. They may contain inaccuracies and are not a substitute for professional medical or dietary advice. USDA does not endorse or sponsor Millo.