How do I log supplements in Base?

Open the supplement stack from the Food Log's shortcuts menu, or from the micronutrient screen. The primary action is Take all, which logs the entire stack for the day in one tap. Individual checkboxes exist for the days you skipped something.

Do supplements count toward my calories?

No. A supplement carries no calories in Base and never appears on the food timeline. Its nutrient payload flows straight into the micronutrient totals instead. That separation is deliberate — it keeps magnesium out of your search results when you are looking for chicken.

Can I log supplements for a previous day?

Yes. The screen has a day scrubber, so you can move back and tick a day you forgot to record. The adherence record is what makes the screen worth having, so backfilling a missed day is a legitimate use rather than cheating.

What happens if I stop taking something?

Mark it inactive and it drops out of the daily list without deleting its history. Inactive supplements are hidden behind a toggle with an Add action to start taking one again, so a seasonal supplement does not have to be recreated each winter.

Do supplements affect my recovery or training numbers?

Not directly. Base does not model a supplement's effect on recovery, strength or anything else, because that would require claiming an effect size it cannot measure for you. What the stack gives you is an adherence record and a contribution to micronutrient coverage.

Log Your Supplement Stack in Two Taps

The two-tap rule

This screen is built to satisfy a constraint that runs through the whole app: the three daily actions should take two taps at most.

Opening the screen is one tap from the Food Log's menu. Take all is the second. That is the entire interaction on a normal day.

The stack, with Take all as the primary action. Individual checkboxes handle the exception — the day you ran out of magnesium — rather than being the path you walk every morning.

Anything that made this a per-item checklist every day would make it a chore, and a daily chore with no immediate payoff is a habit that lasts about a fortnight.

Why a supplement is not a food

In the data model, a supplement is its own thing rather than a food with zero calories. Three consequences follow, and all three are the point:

Property	Effect
No calories	Never touches your calorie target or your energy bar
Not on the timeline	Your food log stays a record of meals
Not in food search	Searching "magnesium" does not compete with your chicken
Payload to micronutrients	Contributes to coverage and to nutrient totals

The alternative — modelling supplements as foods — puts a zero-calorie entry on your timeline every morning and fills your food directory with things you do not eat. Both are small annoyances that compound into an unusable log.

What it contributes

A supplement's nutrient content flows into the micronutrient totals for the day it was taken.

That is the mechanical link, and it is worth understanding what it does and does not tell you. A magnesium supplement raises your magnesium total. It does not raise your coverage figure, because coverage measures the share of your calories that carried a nutrient profile, and a supplement has no calories.

So a day with low coverage and a full stack logged reads exactly as it should: the food side of the day is poorly characterised, and separately, you took your supplements.

Managing the stack

Inactive rather than deleted. Marking a supplement inactive drops it out of the daily list while keeping its history intact. Inactive items sit behind a toggle with an Add action to resume.

This matters for anything seasonal. Vitamin D through the winter should not require recreating the entry every October, and the previous years' adherence record is worth keeping.

Backfilling. The day scrubber moves the date. Recording last night's dose this morning is a legitimate use — the adherence record is the reason the screen exists, and a record with holes in it because you were asleep is less useful, not more honest.

What Base deliberately does not do

It does not model any supplement's effect on your recovery, your strength, your sleep or your body composition.

That would require asserting an effect size for you specifically, and there is no honest way to produce one from an adherence log. Creatine has among the strongest evidence bases of any training supplement, and Base still will not tell you what your creatine did to your squat — because it cannot separate that from the fifteen other things that changed.

What you get instead is an adherence record. If you want to reason about whether something is working, the record plus your strength trend is a far more honest instrument than a number the app invented.

Common mistakes

Ticking items individually every day. Take all exists. Use it, then untick the exception.

Expecting supplements to raise your coverage percentage. They cannot — coverage is about calories, and supplements have none.

Deleting a supplement you have paused. Inactive keeps the history; delete does not.

Logging a supplement you did not take to keep a streak intact. The adherence record is only worth having if it is true.

Expecting the stack to change any training number. It does not, by design.

Using supplements to fix a coverage problem. Low coverage is a logging problem. A supplement raises a total without telling you anything more about what you ate.

What to do next

Set your stack up once, then use Take all each morning. Check it against your micronutrient coverage after a week — if coverage is low, the answer is in how you log food, not in what you add to the stack.