How do I save a meal in Base?

Add the foods to the plate from Search, then switch to the Meal tab on the logging sheet. Give the plate a name and open the review row — it looks exactly like a food detail view, with calories, macros and impact on today — then press Save meal. It appears in your library and in the favourites strip immediately.

What is the difference between a meal and a day template?

A meal is one eating occasion — a bowl, a shake, a sandwich. A day template is a whole day of food across multiple hours, logged in a single tap. Meals are the building blocks; a template is a saved arrangement of them at particular times.

Can I edit a saved meal after creating it?

Yes. Open it from the meal library or from the logging sheet's detail view, where an Edit action appears for saved meals. You can change its name, emoji, macros and default hour. Editing a meal does not alter entries you already logged from it — those keep the macros they were logged with.

What happens when I delete a meal I have already logged?

Meals are archived rather than deleted, and past log entries are untouched. That is deliberate: a historical entry keeps its own copy of the macros it was logged with, so removing a meal from your library can never rewrite what your log said about last month.

Why do my saved meals appear before other foods in search?

Because a meal you assembled yourself is a stronger signal than a food that happens to have been eaten often. The favourites strip lists your saved meals first, then your most-logged directory foods, which is what makes the strip useful on day one rather than after a month of logging.

Save a Meal So Logging It Takes One Tap

Why this is the highest-value habit in the app

Food logging is the habit that breaks first, and it breaks for a specific reason: searching a database five times a day costs about five minutes, and a five-minute daily cost survives roughly three weeks.

A saved meal costs one tap. Someone with fifteen saved meals covering their real diet logs a normal day in under a minute, and that is the difference between a log that lasts a year and one that lasts a month.

The arithmetic that depends on it is unforgiving, too. Adaptive maintenance is back-calculated from your average logged intake — so a habit that decays does not merely stop producing data, it produces wrong data, biased downward by whatever you stopped bothering to log.

Saving a plate

Build the plate first. Add each component from Search with the portion you actually use, because the saved meal freezes those portions.

Then the Meal tab:

The logging sheet. The Meal tab turns whatever is on the plate into a saved meal, reviewed through the same detail view a food gets — calories, macro split and impact on today.

The tab shows the item count and running totals, a name field, and a review row. The review row opens the same detail view a food uses, so you check the assembled meal against today's targets before saving rather than after.

The name defaults to the first item on the plate. That is almost always wrong — "Chicken Breast" for what is actually "Rice Bowl" — so type over it.

The meal library

Settings, Meals, or the Recipes tile in the Food Log's shortcuts menu.

The meal library. Each row carries its macros and how many times it has been logged, which is the honest signal for which of your saved meals are actually earning their place.

Each row shows macros and a use count. Tapping opens the editor, where you can change:

Field	Effect
Name	What it logs as
Emoji	Its glyph in lists and on the plate chips
Protein / Fat / Carbs	The stored macros
Calories	Checked against 4/9/4, with a warning when they disagree by more than 5%
Default hour	Which hour it ranks highest for

The macro mismatch check

If the calories disagree with the macro maths by more than 5%, the editor says so and offers the computed figure as a tap:

protein 42 g × 4 = 168
fat     18 g × 9 = 162
carbs   61 g × 4 = 244
                 = 574 kcal computed
entered            520 kcal   → 9.4% off, flagged

This is the single most common food-entry error, and catching it at write time is what keeps months of logs trustworthy.

Pinned meals

A meal can belong to a pinned group, and pinned groups appear at the very top of the Search tab before favourites and before anything ranked.

This exists for the meals eaten most days — a dining-hall bowl, a standard breakfast. The whole point of pinning is that they are one tap from the moment the sheet opens, and pinned meals are excluded from the favourites strip so the same bowl never appears twice one line apart.

A pinned bowl assembled from components lists those components underneath it, so a number that looks wrong is traceable to the scoop that caused it.

Archive, not delete

Removing a meal archives it. Entries you already logged from it are untouched, because a historical entry carries its own copy of the macros it was logged with.

This is deliberate and it matters: if deleting a meal rewrote history, then tidying your library in March would silently change what your log said about January — and every trend computed from it.

Meals versus day templates

	Meal	Day template
Covers	One eating occasion	A whole day across several hours
Logs to	The hour you are on	Every hour in the template
Built from	Foods on a plate	Meals and foods at set times
Use when	You eat this thing	You eat this day

They compose: a template is an arrangement of meals at times. See using day templates.

Common mistakes

Saving a meal with the wrong portions baked in. The saved macros are whatever the plate held. Set portions before saving, not after.

Leaving the default name. "Chicken Breast" as the name of a whole bowl makes the library unreadable within a fortnight.

Saving every one-off. A meal you eat once is clutter that dilutes the favourites strip. Save repeats.

Saving a mixed plate and expecting complete micronutrients. A saved meal's micronutrients are summed from whichever components had a profile — so one unprofiled ingredient means the totals are a floor. Base carries that caveat rather than hiding it.

Editing a meal expecting past entries to update. They will not, by design.

Not setting a default hour on a breakfast. The ranking uses it, so a breakfast with no default hour ranks the same at 8am as at 8pm.

What to do next

Look at what you ate yesterday and save the two meals you eat most often. That is ten minutes once, and it removes most of the daily cost of logging permanently.