The basics
Do I need an Apple Watch to use Budgie Diet?
Not technically, but you won’t get the best use out of it unless you have either an Apple Watch, or another wearable that contributes resting and active calorie data to Apple Health.
How does Budgie Diet differ from a typical calorie counter like MyFitnessPal or FatSecret?
Most diet apps work based on fixed calorie targets - so you tell FatSecret that you want to eat 2,000 calories a day, and it will tell you how much of that 2,000 calories you have left after the food you’ve eaten. Cool.
But the thing is, every day is different. 2,000 calories might be way too many calories for a day you spend on the couch. And “2,000” is an arbitrary number - how does that fit your weight loss goal? If you only burn 2,200 calories a day, you’ll lose weight very slowly - if at all.
It also doesn’t help you figure out how much you can eat at any one time. You might not know exactly what you’ll eat for dinner later, so how do you know if you can fit [insert food item here] into your day at midday without leaving no room in your budget for dinner at six?
Budgie Diet helps by getting rid of the fixed calorie allowance of regular apps and replacing it with a calorie budget that is based on your real activity and weight loss goals, and that flexes based on your actual day’s activity.
What is my budget?
Your budget is the total calories you’re expected to burn on a given day, less the deficit you’ve asked Budgie Diet to help you reach. So if you’re aiming for a deficit of 500, and you’re expected to burn 2,500 on a given day, the budget is 2,000.
If Apple Health data is available for burned calories, the budget adjusts throughout the day in response to your real calorie burn - up or down.
What is the “Can eat now” figure?
The “Can eat now” figure (the big number in the meter on the “Today” page) is how much of your budget the app thinks you can eat right now while not leaving yourself room for food later.
How does “Can eat now” differ from “Left in budget today”?
“Left in budget” is how much is available from your budget overall after your eaten food. “Can eat now” is how much of that budget Budgie Diet thinks you can eat right now, taking into account the time of day and how much of your budget you’ve already eaten.
I don’t get it.
Think about it in terms of money.
Say you have £100 in your budget to last you a month. Halfway through the month, you’d expect to have spent £50.
Imagine that by that point, you’ve actually spent £25. Your “can spend now” would be £25 - what you can allocate to the month up to date, less what you’ve spent. Your “left in budget” would be £75. If you spent the £25, you’d still have £50 left for the other half of the month. If you spent the £75, you’d be technically “within your budget” but broke for the next two weeks, which doesn’t help you much.
The same principle applies here - the app tries to help you ration your budget so you aren’t eating (spending) calories (money) you will need later.
(Incidentally, if you want something that actually does work like this for money, the bank Monzo’s “Trends” feature works in this way.)
Why is my “Can eat now” figure the same as (or very close to) my “Total budget left”
The app assumes that your budget will get more accurate as the day progresses, and that you’ll need to set aside calories less as the day goes on, so your “Can eat now” and “Total budget left” will converge over time. After 8pm, they’ll be identical.
How do I log food?
You can log food in one of two ways:
- Use Budgie Diet’s built-in logging; or
- Use an external app like MyFitnessPal or FatSecret that saves calorie data to Apple Health. I personally recommend FatSecret, which is ad-free and has a very good food database.
The former is best if you just want to log calories quickly based on available packaging and move on, the latter is best if you want to track other things like macros as well as calories, or want to have access to a food database (and no worries if that’s the case - I still use FatSecret with Budgie for this reason!)
Budget setting
How does Budgie Diet know what calories I will burn?
If it has access to your Apple Health data, it will pull your previous seven days’ resting and active calories, and assumes you will do about that average. Because of the inherent uncertainty of your exercise (you will do a different amount, maybe more or less than the average), it weights predicted active calories down over the course of the day.
If it doesn’t have Apple Health data, it uses the estimates of your energy consumption generated during first setup.
How does Budgie Diet weight its predictions for active calories?
Without giving a full mathematical explanation (available on request), the app removes your actual active calories from its predictions (so you don’t get credit for the same exercise twice) and then weights down the remainder based on the time of day - less so in the mornings, more strongly later in the day (as it assumes that later in the day, if you haven’t reached your average, you probably won’t).
How does Budgie Diet weight its predictions for resting calories?
It simply uses a straight line from 100% at midnight to 0% midnight the day after, since it’s reasonably certain that you won’t suddenly stop burning energy totally part-way through the day (hopefully).
I think my budget is too generous with its predictions/doesn’t predict enough calories!
The default setting is a balance between giving you too many predicted active calories early in the day and potentially giving you too few later if you exercise in the evening. If this doesn’t work for you, you can go to “Change active calorie weighting” in settings and choose one of the other options.
If you do most of your exercise in the evenings, I would suggest you use the “Forgiving” preset, since this only really starts weighting down your predictions after about 6pm. If you do your exercise either in the morning or not at all, “Harsh” may work for you. If you’re mostly inactive, it’s probably best to turn off active calorie prediction totally.
You can also set these settings per day, which is helpful if you have a fixed schedule where you do more exercise on certain days.
I don’t like the idea of Budgie Diet predicting my active calories!
You can turn off prediction of active calories in the “Change active calorie weighting”. Doing that means your budget will only take account of your resting calories and your actual active calories burned.
I don’t want Budgie Diet to predict any calories!
That’s kind of its thing. It may well not be for you (and that’s OK!)
Common issues
Why does the app show a message saying that my calorie burn is being estimated?
Here’s a few reasons this can happen and how to solve them!
- You don’t have an Apple Watch - no Apple Watch means no calorie burn data. There’s not really a solution to this other than either accepting the estimates or buying an Apple Watch - sorry!
- You do have an Apple Watch, but you’ve not worn it today - if you don’t wear the watch, it won’t send your resting calories to Apple Health. Put the watch on and wait five minutes or so for it to sync.
- You didn’t grant Budgie Diet access to your Apple Health data - if you don’t, it can’t see anything (it gets a total of zero calories burned) so it has to estimate. To fix this, use the Health app to grant Budgie Diet permission to read your dietary energy, resting energy and active calories.
- You did grant Health data access, but turned on “Ignore Apple Health data” in Settings - this setting forces Budgie Diet to rely on its estimates only. Turn the setting off if you don’t want that.
- It’s literally midnight - you won’t have any calorie data yet. Just wait a few minutes 🙂
Why does the reported calories out differ on the Food page from the History page?
In short, this is due to the way in which Apple Health reports calorie data. It’s annoying, but you can rest assured that the difference is going to be a bit less than the inherent inaccuracy of your Apple Watch’s measurements.
For a longer explanation - to avoid bottlenecking app performance by running multiple queries to HealthKit, the graph page uses a single statistical query for an entire week, whereas the food page pulls the calorie total on a specific day. For some reason, Apple Health returns different results for the same time periods when you do this. I believe it may be to do with rounding, but I genuinely don’t know.
The app itself
How does this make money?
It doesn’t and I don’t aim for it to! I made it for me and hope other people like it too.
If you like it, I’d appreciate it if you sent me a donation from the “send me a protein bar” link in Settings, but no worries if not - it’s free and it will always stay that way.
Do you plan to release this for Android?
Nope - sorry! I don’t have an Android phone or any particular wish to develop for Android.