Meals & Meal Categories

This section provides an overview of meal-related features in SparkyFitness.

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Suggested Meal Category Times

SparkyFitness dynamically suggests the appropriate meal category (e.g., Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks, or custom categories) when you log food based on your current time of day.

How Suggested Times Work

Each meal category can have a Default Time assigned to it:

• When you log food, the app finds the meal category whose default_time is the latest time that is less than or equal to your current time ($\le \text{now}$).
• Each meal category's default time defines the start of its window until the next scheduled meal.
• For example, if Snacks is set to 5:00 PM (17:00) and Dinner is set to 7:00 PM (19:00):
  • Logging food between 5:00 PM and 6:59 PM will automatically suggest Snacks.
  • Logging food at or after 7:00 PM will automatically suggest Dinner.

Customizing Default Times

You can customize the target start time for any meal category on both Web and Mobile:

• Web: Go to Settings → Meal Categories and edit the Default Time (HH:MM) for any category.
• Mobile: Go to Settings → Food Settings → Suggested Meal Times and adjust the target times (HH:MM).

Deleting a Custom Meal Category

Custom meal categories can be deleted from Settings → Meal Categories on Web. System defaults (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks) cannot be deleted, only hidden.

If the category has never been used, it is removed immediately. If anything still references it, a dialog shows exactly what is affected — diary entries, logged meals, planned items, and meal plan template items — and offers two choices:

• Move items and delete — everything is reassigned to another meal category you pick. Nutrition values, dates, and times are preserved; only the category label changes, so daily totals stay the same. This is the recommended option.
• Delete everything — permanently removes those records along with their logged nutrition. This cannot be undone.

If someone you share your diary with has entries in that category, the delete is refused until those are cleared, since they are not yours to remove.

INFO

Prefer hiding a category (the eye icon) if you only want it out of your diary. Hiding keeps all history intact.

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Custom Meals

Custom meals can be created and consist of previously added foods. That way, you can group foods together and don't have to add them one by one. An example of how this might look like is provided below:

Meal Management:

Adding a meal: