01
Log a food
Select a meal, then tick an ingredient or a saved meal from your notes.
noshlog. see. adjust.
Nosh uses notes in Obsidian, defined as meals and ingredients, to track macros, nutrition, and progress. Seamless between your desk and your phone, synced along with your vault.
Free and open source. Runs inside Obsidian on desktop, iOS and Android.
0macros and nutrients tracked
0food groups, counted in servings
0accounts, payments or ads
How it works
Three steps, most days.
02
See your numbers
Visual progress across each macro, colored according to ceiling or floor. A score sits on top, calculated with a custom weighting function.
03
Adjust tomorrow
The week shows a higher-level view of your progress, and what gaps need filling. A report for the day, the week and the month ties it all together in simple tables and optional AI analysis.
Features
Built from notes you already keep.
A tag you choose marks a note for the Nosh sidebar. Folders play no part, so a vault with recipes in it needs no rearranging, only a tag and frontmatter.
Log by ingredient, or by the meal you saved
The picker is organized by occasion. Tick ingredients one at a time, tick a saved meal, or build one out of parts and name it for next time.
- Each occasion opens with the most recent first, so workday lunches are easy to add.
- Copy yesterday's breakfast in one press.
- Notes are live synced across days. If you find a mistake, or want to update a macro, it updates across logged days.
A score that knows what time it is
Every bar is a floor, a ceiling or a range, and each pays out in proportion to how close it stands. The composite score is their weighted average. While the day's calories are still coming in, floors are measured against the share of the day you have eaten, so the number starts at 100 and moves with each meal. By default:
- Protein, fibre, potassium and calcium are floors. Sodium, fat and saturated fat are ceilings.
- Carbs are drawn grey and never judged. Calories only count when over.
- Tap the score for the three bars costing it most.
The week and the month, without blending them
"Am I on track right now" and "did the pattern hold" are different questions, so Day, Week and Month are different tabs. The week is a row a day with its meals and calories. The month is a calendar: a graphical, high-level view.
- Nuts, legumes and sweets are weekly groups in DASH, and are scored against the week.
- A day you did not log is missing, not a zero.
- Export any span as a markdown report, with a table that puts the largest sodium figure in bold.
It is all notes, and they stay yours
A meal is a markdown file with its numbers in frontmatter. A day's log is a note too, one per day, so a search, a backlink, a Dataview query and a backup all see what you ate. Edit the note and the day follows. Delete it and the day is cleared.
- Works entirely offline. There is no telemetry, no account with the author and no server.
- Sync however you already sync. A note arriving from another device is read the same way.
- Open source under the MIT licence.
Try it
Build a breakfast.
Tap an ingredient to add one serving. The bars are the day's targets from the 2,000 kcal DASH pattern, and the numbers come from ingredient notes like the ones Nosh writes for you.
This breakfast
Nothing logged yet
Food groupsnone yet
Targets
Type your calories. Every target follows.
Every DASH pattern is the same plan at a different size, so one figure fills in all of them. This is the arithmetic Nosh runs when you press Fill in settings. Every row stays editable afterwards.
- The 2,000 kcal reference is 18% protein, 55% carbohydrate, 27% fat and 6% saturated fat. The grams keep those shares as the calories move.
- Potassium and calcium are amounts to reach, not shares of a meal. They stay put.
- Sodium is asked separately and does not scale. 2,300 mg is the standard limit, 1,500 the lower target for bringing blood pressure down, and anything between is a step on the way.
- Servings scale the same way, rounded to the half. Dairy holds at 2 to 3 a day whatever the size, as DASH does.
Sodium a day
Targets filled in for 2,000 kcal and 2,300 mg sodium.
Daily nutrient targets
Calories2,000 kcal
Protein floor90 g
Carbs reference275 g
Fat ceiling60 g
Saturated fat ceiling13 g
Fiber floor30 g
Sodium ceiling2,300 mg
Potassium floor4,700 mg
Calcium floor1,250 mg
Food-group servings
Grains a day6–8
Vegetables a day4–5
Fruit a day4–5
Low-fat dairy a day2–3
Lean meat/fish a day≤ 6
Fats & oils a day≤ 3
Nuts & seeds a week4–5
Legumes a week4–5
Sweets a week≤ 5
A scale of the reference rather than the published table for each calorie level. It lands near it without being it, and every row is yours to change.
Nosh AI · optional
A draft from wherever the food turns up. Off until you say so.
Give Nosh an Anthropic API key and drafting switches on. There is more than one way to add to the log, because food turns up in more than one place: a thought, a label, a line in your journal, a menu. Claude intelligently decides whether to log a meal or an ingredient, and nothing reaches your vault until you review and accept.
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Type itDraft
Press Draft and say what you ate, how much if you know. "Two eggs scrambled in butter, a slice of sourdough."
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Photograph itCamera
A nutrition label is read rather than entered by hand. A plate is estimated from what is on it. Add "half of it" and the portion follows.
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Jot it anywhereAdd to log
Select a line in your journal, daily note or any note, right-click and choose Add to log, or run it from the command palette. It becomes a note, logged, and a link takes the place of the words.
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Change it in wordsEdit this meal
"It was brown rice, not white." "Half the cheese." Claude redrafts the note, and you check the portions before it is saved over.
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Order itEating out
Name the restaurant and Claude reads the menu and recommends three orders that fit what is left of your day.
Choose one and the phone shows it.
Off until you give it a keyWithout a credential none of this exists, and the plugin never touches the network.
Sent only when you press the buttonA draft, a note you are asking about, or a photo goes over when you ask, and nothing else ever does.
Billed to your own accountRequests run against the Anthropic developer platform at API rates. There is no account with us and no markup.
Pricing
Free. The optional AI runs on your own key.
There are no accounts with the author, no payments and no ads. Nosh AI is off until you give it a credential, and then it talks to Anthropic and nothing else.
Nosh
$0open source, MIT
Everything the tracker does, entirely offline, on desktop and phone.
- Meals and ingredients read from your notes
- Nine nutrients and nine food groups against DASH targets, every one editable
- Composite score, week strip and month calendar
- Reports as markdown notes, a day, a week or a month
- Sample notes to start a vault with
Nosh AI
Your keybilled by Anthropic at API rates
The same free plugin, plus the things that need a model. Nothing is sent until you press the button that asks for it.
- Drafts from words, a photo, a line in any note, a change in plain words, or a menu
- What's for dinner: a meal that fits what the day still has room for, with a method
- Eating out: orders that fit, read from the restaurant's own menu
- Ask about any recipe in your vault, including ones Nosh did not write
- A reading on any report: what the days show and what to watch
Does it work on my phone?
Yes. Nosh runs inside Obsidian on iOS and Android with the same views as the desktop. Logging, the camera for labels and plates, and reports all work there, and the AI features take the same API key on a phone as on a desktop.
Do I have to move my recipes into a Nosh folder?
No. A note is a meal or an ingredient because its tags say so, and folders play no part. The folder setting only decides where Nosh files the notes it writes. Ingredients are grouped in the picker by the food group they contribute most to, worked out from the servings the note already carries.
Does anything leave my vault?
Not unless you turn on Nosh AI and press a button that asks for it. Then what you typed into a draft or selected in a note, the note you are asking about or editing, the photo you took, or the restaurant you named goes to the Anthropic API and nowhere else. There is no telemetry, no account with the author, and no file is read or written outside the vault.
I am not following DASH. Can I set my own targets?
Every bar has an editable target, a weight, and a shape: a floor to reach, a ceiling to stay under, a range, or a reference that is drawn but never judged. Type your calorie level and the DASH pattern scales to it. Then change any row, hide the ones you do not want, and the score, the colours and the prompts follow.
How do I install it?
Nosh is in Obsidian's community plugin list. The Install in Obsidian button on this page opens its listing inside Obsidian: choose Install, then Enable. You can also find it by searching for Nosh under Settings, Community plugins, Browse. An empty vault can start from the sample notes in settings.
Start with tonight's dinner.
Install Nosh, add the sample notes, and log one meal. The day's numbers are on screen before you finish eating.
The button opens Nosh in Obsidian's community plugins. If nothing happens, search for Nosh under Settings, Community plugins, Browse.
