How Food to Mood works

Three steps, then a fourth thing that is easy to miss: a food log is only useful if you read it with the rest of your day in view.

Photograph the meal before you eat it. The app returns an estimated forecast in about five seconds — a starting point for the day, not a measurement. You can log a meal without a photo if you would rather not take one, and the app still works if you never grant camera access at all.
A couple of hours later the app asks how the meal actually landed: energy, digestive comfort, and heaviness, plus any symptoms you want to tap. This is the half of the journal that matters. The forecast is a guess; the check-in is you.
Once a handful of meals have both a forecast and a check-in, the journal starts to be worth reading. You are looking for meals that keep turning up alongside the afternoons you liked — not for a verdict.

When personalisation starts

After three or more completed check-ins, the app starts drawing on more of your own history when it builds a forecast. That is all “personal” means here. It does not mean a pattern has been proven, that a cause has been found, or that the app has worked out which foods suit you. It means the estimate is using more of your own answers than it did on day one.

What else was going on

A meal is never the only thing that happened. Sleep, workload, stress, when you ate, how much you moved, caffeine, noise, and who you were with all shape how an afternoon feels. Food to Mood records none of that, which is precisely why it will not tell you a food caused anything. Read your own log with the rest of the day in view.

How much you slept, and how well.
Workload, deadlines, and how much of the day you spent sitting still.
Stress, and whatever else the day put in front of you.
Caffeine, alcohol, water, and when each of them happened.
Movement — a walk after lunch is not nothing.
Where you ate, how fast, and who with.

None of that is in your journal, so none of it can be ruled out. That is the honest limit of a food log, and it is worth knowing before you read one.

What it records, in full

The what an energy tracker can and cannot show you page lists every field the app stores and every thing it deliberately leaves out. The FAQ answers the questions people ask first.