# Describing a meal

> How to write so Kallo reads you correctly, and what happens between hitting send and seeing a result.

This is Kallo's main way in. You write a sentence; Kallo returns dishes,
ingredients, weights and nutrition for you to check and confirm.

## How to write

There is no required syntax. But a few habits make results noticeably better.

### Say how it was cooked

Cooking method moves fat more than almost anything else:

- `grilled salmon` and `fried salmon` — same fish, clearly different.
- `steamed broccoli` and `stir-fried broccoli` — the difference is the oil.
- `roast chicken` and `fried chicken` — a large gap.

### Give weights when you know them

A specific number always beats a guess. `150g grilled chicken breast` is used as
written, with no estimation applied.

### Write the whole meal in one go

`grilled chicken breast + rice + steamed broccoli + an iced tea` gives better
results than four separate entries, because Kallo sees the whole meal at once
and groups the dishes correctly.

> Example — described as: "grilled chicken breast with rice, plus a fried egg"

| Dish | Protein | Carbs | Fat | Calories |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Grilled chicken breast with rice | 46g | 62g | 12g | 540 kcal |
| Fried egg | 7g | 1g | 9g | 110 kcal |
| **Total** | **53g** | **63g** | **21g** | **650 kcal** |

> **If you write in Vietnamese**
>
> Kallo takes Vietnamese, English, or a mix. When you do write Vietnamese, keep
> the diacritics: `bò` is beef, `bơ` is butter and `bổ` is nutritious, and Kallo
> relies on the marks to tell them apart. Writing without them degrades results
> significantly.

## What happens when you send

Results stream in rather than appearing all at once. You will see the stages
follow each other:

1. **Breaking down the meal**

Your sentence is separated into dishes, each into ingredients, with cooking
methods and any portion hints you gave. No grams are produced at this point.

2. **Matching ingredients**

Each ingredient is looked up in the food composition data. Dish names appear
first at this stage.

3. **Anchoring the portion**

The weight gets settled. If you stated one, Kallo uses exactly that. If the dish
is too ambiguous to settle, this step becomes a question for you.

4. **Estimating nutrition**

For each matched ingredient, nutrition is computed with bounds, then collapsed
to the figure shown.

## When Kallo asks instead

Sometimes you get a question rather than a number. That is intentional.

`a bowl of soup` could be 200ml or 700ml — too wide a gap to guess. Rather than
quietly picking something in the middle, Kallo asks which bowl you used, and
offers reference sizes with pictures to choose from.

> **Why ask rather than guess**
>
> A confident wrong estimate is worse than a question. Kallo has an explicit
> threshold for this: when the plausible weight range is too wide, it stops and
> asks.

## Adjusting before you save

Tap **Edit** to nudge each item. For ingredients measured in grams or millilitres
each tap moves 10 units; for countable things, one unit per tap. Totals update
live.

Dishes served in a vessel — bowls, cups, plates — also get a size picker with
reference photographs.

Nothing is saved until you confirm.

## When the result is wrong

A few options, in the order worth trying:

1. **Rewrite more specifically.** Add the cooking method, add a weight, split
   the dishes out.
2. **Adjust by hand after analysis.** Faster than rewriting if only one item is
   off.
3. **Use [manual logging](https://kallo.fit/en/docs/logging/manual)** if you weighed the
   ingredients.
4. **Send feedback.** If an ingredient is missing or matched wrongly, tell us in
   Settings — it goes straight to the team.

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_Source: [https://kallo.fit/en/docs/logging/describe-a-meal](https://kallo.fit/en/docs/logging/describe-a-meal) · Last updated: 2026-08-03 · Kallo docs index: [https://kallo.fit/llms.txt](https://kallo.fit/llms.txt)_