Never tracked before? Start here
Most people who try tracking give up in the first fortnight. Usually not because it was hard, but because nobody told them what it was for or how little of it is actually necessary.
What it is for
Tracking is not a test and it is not a punishment. It is a way of finding out what you are already doing, because almost nobody knows. People routinely under-estimate what they eat by a wide margin, and that is not a character flaw: portions are invisible, restaurant food is opaque, and nobody is carrying a calculator.
You are collecting information about yourself. That is the whole job. What you do with it afterwards is a separate decision, and you are allowed to make it later.
The smallest version that works
- Log what you eat, roughly. Scan a barcode where there is one, search where there is not. Close enough is genuinely close enough at the start.
- Weigh yourself a couple of times a week, same conditions each time. First thing, before eating, is easiest to repeat.
- Ignore the daily numbers for the first few weeks. They bounce around for reasons that have nothing to do with you: salt, water, what is still in your gut, where you are in your cycle. The week-to-week direction is the signal. The day is noise.
That is it. No weighing every ingredient, no logging in advance, no perfect days.
The bit people get wrong
The scale does not measure fat. It measures everything: bone, muscle, organs, the water you are holding, last night's dinner. A pound overnight is not a pound of anything meaningful, and chasing it is how people end up miserable and eating less than they should.
This is why Kriterion works from trends across weeks rather than from what the scale said this morning, and why it will tell you when it is not sure.
What Kriterion does differently, for a beginner
Most apps hand you a calorie number in the first minute, worked out from an equation, and then never change it no matter what happens to you. If it was wrong for you, and for most people it is wrong by a fair amount, you spend months doing what it said and wondering why nothing moved.
Kriterion starts from the same textbook place, because at the beginning it has nothing else, but it treats that as a starting guess rather than an answer. As you log, it works out what your body is actually doing and moves the number towards that. And it tells you how sure it is, which is the part you can actually check.
You do not need to understand any of that to use it. The longer version is here if you want it.
How long before it is useful
Logging is useful immediately, because seeing what you actually eat is most of the value and it does not require the app to be clever.
The measured burn rate takes a couple of weeks of reasonably consistent logging before it can say anything worth hearing. Why, exactly. Nobody is any good at a job in their first week, and an app that pretends otherwise is guessing at you confidently.
If this is not a good idea for you
For some people counting food is actively harmful, and no app is worth that. If tracking has ever tipped you into eating too little, or into thinking about food in a way that made your life smaller, please give this a miss. That is not a sales tactic. It is the honest answer, and it is the same answer we would give a friend.
If you are not sure, speaking to a GP or a registered dietitian is a better first step than any app, this one included. Kriterion is a wellness and training tracker. It is not a medical device, it does not diagnose anything, and nothing in it is medical advice.