Plain-language glossary · Founded 2025
Plain-language definitions for the calorie-tracking, macro-counting, and nutrition-app vocabulary people actually use day to day.
You open your calorie app and it asks you to pick a "verified entry," or your barcode scan returns three different answers for the same Greek yogurt, or you wonder whether the AI photo log is good enough for a Tuesday lunch. This glossary explains the words behind all of that — in plain English, with the actual apps people use.
Recently updated
- Barcode Scanning Using your phone camera to read a product's UPC barcode and pull its nutrition info directly from the app's database.
- Photo Logging Logging a meal by taking a picture of it and letting the app identify the food and estimate portions, instead of typing or scanning.
- AI Food Recognition Using machine learning to automatically identify what foods appear in a photo so they can be logged without manual search.
- Computer Vision Portion Estimation Using computer vision to estimate how much food is on a plate — typically in grams or volume — from one or more photos.
- Plate Segmentation The computer vision step that draws a boundary around each distinct food on the plate, separating the chicken from the rice from the broccol…
- Volume Estimation Measuring how much of a food you have in terms of space it occupies (cups, tablespoons, ounces) rather than its weight in grams.
What you'll find here
Written for real humans
I'm Nina. I've spent five years as a certified trainer and nutrition coach watching people get tripped up by the same vocabulary over and over. "Verified entry." "Tare weight." "Logging friction." "Quick Add vs recipe builder." Your app assumes you already know these. You probably don't, and that's fine.
Every entry here explains the word in plain English first, then shows you how it shows up inside the apps you actually use — MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, MacroFactor, Lose It!, Yazio, and the newer AI-photo tools. Nothing is a marketing pitch. I cite primary sources (PubMed, FDA, USDA, Mayo, Harvard Nutrition Source) and link straight to them.
No jargon that isn't defined right there on the page. That's the rule.