Create a custom food
Updated 2026-07-06
Diet2Fit's food database is built Indian-first, but no database can contain your dal — the one with your grandmother's tadka ratio and that extra spoon of ghee. Custom foods solve this: create your own food or recipe entry once, let the AI fill in an estimated nutrition profile, review it, and then log it as easily as any database item, forever.
When to create a custom food
- Home recipes — your family's poha, your specific dal, the Sunday chicken curry made your way. Generic database entries are averages; your recipe isn't average.
- Packaged items not in the database — a local brand of namkeen, a regional sweet, a protein bar the search can't find.
- Regular "combos" you eat as one thing — if your standard breakfast is always the same plate, one custom entry can cover it.
If the food is in the database and matches what you ate, just use the database entry — custom foods are for the gaps.
How it works
- When adding a food to your log, choose to create a custom food.
- Give it a name and describe what it is (for a recipe, the ingredients help).
- The AI estimates the nutrition — calories and macros — for your entry.
- Review the estimate before saving. This step matters: the AI is making an educated guess from your description, and you know things it doesn't, like how much oil actually goes into your kadhai.
- Save it. From now on, it's yours to log any time in seconds.
For packaged foods, you don't need the AI's guess at all if the packet is in your hand — the nutrition label on the back is the accurate source. Check the AI's estimate against the label and correct it to match. (There's no barcode scanning; the label's numbers go in via review.)
Review the AI's estimate like you'd taste-check a dish
A quick sanity checklist before you save:
- Portion basis: is the estimate for one katori, one piece, or 100 g? Make sure it matches how you'll actually log it.
- The invisible calories: oil, ghee, butter, and sugar are where AI estimates most often run low for home cooking, because "dal" can mean anything from boiled moong to a ghee-laden dal makhani. If your version is rich, nudge the numbers up.
- Reasonableness: a katori of plain dal at 600 kcal or a paratha at 40 kcal should make you pause and correct.
An estimate you've reviewed once is then correct every single time you log that food — that's the payoff.
The tip that saves you hours: build your family staples once
Most Indian home cooking rotates through a surprisingly small set of dishes. Spend twenty minutes one weekend creating custom entries for your household's core rotation — your dal, your poha, your usual sabzi style, the everyday roti with the ghee you actually apply, your chai the way you take it. Ten to fifteen entries typically cover 70–80% of a home eater's month.
Two small habits make these entries even better:
- Name them with the portion built in — "Mummy's dal (1 katori)", "Home poha (1 plate)". Future-you will log in two taps without re-thinking quantities.
- Update an entry when the recipe changes — switched from ghee to less oil, or made the poha heavier on peanuts? Revisit the entry so it stays true.
After it's saved
Your custom food behaves like any other item: log it in the Daily Log, use it for off-plan entries, and it counts toward your daily totals and weekly report like everything else.
One caveat: custom food nutrition is an estimate, even after review. If you're tracking for a medical reason — diabetes, kidney conditions, or anything where precise numbers matter clinically — verify important entries with a qualified dietician or doctor rather than relying on estimates alone.
Still stuck? Email contact@diet2fit.com — a human reads every message.