Nutrition tracking on the client record

Two panels on a client’s Tracking tab, under Activity, answer two different questions. Nutrition asks whether what the client ate matched the plan you gave them. Nutrition logs is the raw record: what they ate, day by day and meal by meal, with the photos they took.

Both read the same logs, and both open on the last 30 days. The window chips are Month, 30 d, 90 d, 6 mo and All, where Month means the calendar month so far.

Nutrition: adherence against the plan you set

Everything on this panel is measured against the plan you assigned, and never against a general guideline. That is the whole design of it. A number judged against a population reference would be a clinical reading; the same number against the target you set is your own instruction being followed or not.

The three tiles

• Target adherence is the share of logged days whose calories landed within ten per cent of the plan’s calorie target. It is a band rather than a line because nobody hits a number exactly, and a coach who wanted exactness would be reading the bar chart anyway.
• Protein days counts the logged days that reached at least ninety per cent of the plan’s protein target, out of the days the client logged. It reads 17 / 22, not a percentage, because the denominator is the thing you want to see: seventeen good days out of twenty-two logged is a different conversation from seventeen out of thirty.
• Days logged is how many separate days carry at least one meal in the window. A client who logs four meals on Monday and nothing else contributes one day, not four.

Why adherence reads as a dash

No plan, no adherence. With no nutrition plan assigned to the client, the first two tiles read a dash and the first one says no target set underneath. That is deliberate: a percentage against a target nobody set is arithmetic dressed up as coaching.

The same happens when the client’s only plan carries no calories, which is more common than it sounds. A supplement stack is a plan with nine items and zero calories, and a plan built as a container for other templates can be the same.

Which plan the target comes from: Protocol takes the client’s plans newest first and uses the most recently updated one that actually states calories, either its own totals or the total of the food on it. The plan named beside the panel title is the one the targets came from, so if that name is not the plan you meant, the target is not the one you meant either. Assign the right plan, or open the one you meant and check it has food or totals on it.

The last logged day, and the chart

Last logged day breaks the most recent day with anything on it into calories, protein, carbs and fat, each against the plan’s figure. The bar under a row is drawn only when there is a target for it, because a full bar against nothing would read as “on target” for a target nobody set. A plan that states calories but no fat gives you a fat row with no bar.

Day by day is four charts, one per nutrient: calories, protein, carbs and fat. Each is one bar per logged day across the window, in date order, with that nutrient’s target as a dashed line behind the bars where the plan states one. Days the client did not log are not drawn at all, so a chart reads as “what they logged”, not “how they did every day”.

Each chart is scaled to its own days rather than to a shared axis. Calories run into the thousands and fat rarely passes eighty, so one shared scale would flatten fat into a line along the floor. The number in the top right of each chart is the target when there is one, and the unit when there is not. What you are reading is the shape: the week protein slid while the calorie total held is exactly the thing a calories-only chart cannot show you, and it is usually the thing worth asking about.

Logged as photo, or as text

The Logged as filter narrows both the tiles and the chart to meals logged one way: Photo or Text. It is a real question rather than trivia. A client who photographs their food is telling you something a typed “chicken and rice” is not, and if you agreed on photos, this is how you check the habit is holding.

Nutrition logs: one row per day

Open logs, or the Nutrition logs row in the rail, opens the record itself. The important difference from a plain list of entries is that a row is a day, not a meal.

That matters more than it sounds. Listed meal by meal, a client who photographs four meals fills four rows and a client who logs one big entry fills one, and the list reads as though the second client ate less. By day, the two are comparable.

Click a day and it unfolds underneath rather than opening anything: every meal on that day, each with its photo where the client took one, the time it was logged, how many items it holds and its calories. Clicking a meal opens it for editing, which is where you fix a portion the client guessed badly or an item the photo read wrong.

Add log, top right, records a meal for the client yourself, against whatever date you choose.

Long windows are capped at the most recent 500 logs, so narrow the window if you are hunting for something older than that.

The Only filter, and one trap in it

Only narrows the meals, not the days: Photographed, Typed and With a note. A day survives if any of its meals match, and unfolds to show the ones that did. That is on purpose, because filtering whole days would hide a photographed breakfast on account of a typed dinner.

Picking Photographed and Typed together returns nothing. A meal was logged one way or the other, so asking for both at once asks for meals that are both, and there are none. Pick one. Combining either of them with With a note works exactly as you would expect.

Where the food itself comes from

Clients log from their phone, by photo, by text, or by picking foods from a list. What each of those does to the numbers, and why the same meal can come out slightly differently twice, is in Nutrition FAQ. Building the plan these panels measure against is in Programs and the weekly grid.