The average person eats the same 15-20 meals on rotation. Your Monday porridge, your go-to chicken wrap, your Friday night stir-fry. Yet every time you log these in most tracking apps, you're searching for individual ingredients and assembling them from scratch. LBN's custom foods and recipes feature lets you create these once and log them with a single tap forever after. It's the single biggest time-saver in nutrition tracking.
less logging time for regular meals. Once you've created a custom food or recipe, future logs take seconds instead of minutes. Over a month, this saves hours of tedious data entry.
Custom Foods vs Recipes: What's the Difference?
LBN offers two ways to save your own food entries:
- Custom food — A single item with manually entered nutritional values. Perfect for meals you know the total nutrition of (e.g., your local takeaway's chicken rice box, or a meal prep you've calculated yourself).
- Recipe — Multiple ingredients combined with portion control. LBN calculates the total nutrition from the individual ingredients and lets you log any fraction of the recipe. Perfect for dishes you cook in batches.
Both appear in your search results alongside database foods, making them just as easy to log.
How to Create a Custom Food
The Custom Food Form
Enter your nutritional data once, log with one tap every time after
How to Create a Recipe
Recipes are particularly powerful for people who meal prep. Create a recipe once for your batch-cooked chicken, rice and vegetable box. Set it to 5 servings (one for each weekday). Now every day at lunch, you log one serving with a single tap and get perfectly accurate nutrition data. No re-entering ingredients, no guessing portions, no wasted time. This is how consistent trackers stay consistent: they reduce friction until logging becomes almost automatic.
Feature Overview
Instant Search
Custom foods and recipes appear in your regular food search. Type the name and they pop up alongside database results. No separate section to navigate to.
Adjustable Portions
Log any fraction of a serving. Had half a portion? Log 0.5. Made a double serving? Log 2. The nutrition scales automatically.
Edit Any Time
Changed your recipe? Updated the ingredients? Edit your custom food or recipe at any time. Future logs will use the updated values.
Barcode Integration
When building a recipe, you can barcode scan packaged ingredients to pull in accurate nutritional data. No manual entry needed for ingredients that have barcodes.
Batch cooking is one of the most effective strategies for hitting your nutrition targets consistently. Cook a large batch of a recipe on Sunday, divide it into containers, and eat it throughout the week. Create the recipe in LBN once with the full batch amounts and set the number of servings to however many containers you filled. Now you have perfect per-serving nutrition for the entire week. Popular batch-cook recipes: chilli, curry, bolognese, overnight oats, chicken and rice bowls, soups and stews. Pair this with your macro tracking to ensure your weekly meal prep hits your protein, carb and fat targets.
When to Use Custom Foods vs Recipes
- Custom food — You know the total nutrition but not the individual ingredients (restaurant meals, takeaways, simple snacks)
- Recipe — You know the ingredients and want LBN to calculate the total nutrition (home-cooked meals, meal prep, baking)
Many experienced LBN users have a mix of both: recipes for their home-cooked staples and custom foods for their regular restaurant orders.
Completely Free
Creating custom foods and recipes is entirely free in LBN. No limits on how many you can create, no premium requirement. Some competitors like MyFitnessPal restrict recipe creation to premium users. LBN believes the tools for accurate tracking should be available to everyone. Free
Custom foods and recipes are the secret weapon of consistent trackers. They eliminate the tedious, repetitive data entry that makes most people give up on food logging. Build your personal food library in LBN, and logging your regular meals becomes as fast as a single tap. Download LBN free on Android and create your first custom food today.
