Build a Calorie Tracker for Intermittent Fasting
If you’re doing intermittent fasting, most calorie apps track everything except the thing you actually care about: staying inside your window and hitting macros when you do eat. Here’s how to build your own tracker that fits your exact routine.
Why build instead of download
Search for the best calorie tracking apps for intermittent fasting and you’ll find plenty of solid options. That’s honest — some are genuinely good. But every one of them is built for the average user, so you end up ignoring half the screens and fighting the rest.
Auto flips this. You describe what you want, snap a photo of your meal, and Auto builds you a personal mini-app — a “Frame” — around it. You get a fasting window macro tracker that shows only your stats, your targets, your meal times. It takes minutes, and it’s yours to change whenever your plan changes.
Building it in Auto
Open Auto and describe the tracker you want. A good starting prompt covers four things:
- Logging: analyze a food photo (or free text) and pull calories, protein, fat, and carbs — plus fiber, sugar, and sodium if you track those.
- Today: the current day’s meals with progress toward your targets.
- History & trends: swipe through past days, and see 7- and 30-day charts.
- Settings: set your own calorie and macro goals.
Then keep talking to refine it. Ask for reminders at your eating-window meal times, a detail page when you tap a meal, or chat editing so you can fix a logged item by typing. Each request rebuilds the Frame live.
How someone built theirs
One Auto user built a Frame they called Meal Tracker, and their prompts are a good blueprint.
They started with the full structure in one go: photo analysis for primary stats (calories, protein, fat, carbs) and secondary stats (fiber, sugar, sodium), plus four screens — today, history you tab through day by day, 7/30-day trend charts, and a settings screen for targets.
From there they iterated on the real-world stuff:
- Added manual logging by free text or just telling Auto what they ate.
- Added push notifications at meal times — useful for lining up with an eating window.
- Built a full meal detail page with a full-bleed photo, then asked to make the macro numbers “big and chunky” and add icons and a card for calories.
- Fixed a timezone bug so meals landed on the correct local day.
- Let the AI chat read and edit meals and the goals themselves.
They also hit the unglamorous parts — padding under the tab bar, a delete button hidden behind it, and a couple of build errors during a template migration. Auto worked through the fixes. That back-and-forth is normal; you’re shaping something until it’s right.
FAQ
Do I need to code? No. You describe what you want in plain language and Auto builds and edits it.
Can it handle an IF calorie counter with photo logging? Yes — photo analysis for estimated macros is the core feature, and you can also log by text.
Can I change my targets later? Yes. Edit goals in settings or just tell Auto to update them.
Will it track my fasting window too? Set your meal-time reminders and log only inside your window — or ask Auto to add a window timer.