Complete and incomplete days
Some days you tally every bite, and some days the count stops after lunch. Treat both as full totals and a half-logged Tuesday looks like a very light one. Balance Point has you flag each day as complete or incomplete, and an empty day stays empty in the math.
Four totals a day
Intake in Balance Point is four numbers per day: calories, protein, fat, and carbohydrates. You can type them in, or let the app pull them from Health when a food app you already use writes them there. There’s no food database and no meal-by-meal logging in the app, so the totals come from wherever you count today.
From a formula to an adaptive estimate
On the first day, energy burned comes from a formula. That’s a starting guess based on general equations, and it can be off for any one person. Once enough complete days build up, Balance Point compares what you ate against how your weight trend moved over the same stretch, and the estimate shifts toward what those two records imply together.
The estimate always shows where it stands, along with a confidence level that tells you how far to trust the current figure. It reports one of four states:
- Formula
- Adapting
- Stable
- Paused
Because the adaptive part leans on the trend, it gets its signal from the same weigh-ins that draw the chart. A run of complete intake days with regular weigh-ins gives it the most to work with.
Targets with guardrails
You can set an intake target for maintenance, loss, or gain. Each target has guardrails, and a check-in comes around on a seven-day cycle. A weight goal and its plan are a separate setup, covered on the goals page.
Using it alongside a food app
Balance Point tracks totals and estimates expenditure, and each day’s totals sit in the Journal under their date. The two sources can differ, too: weight might arrive from a scale through Health while you type intake by hand, and the estimate works from both the same way. If you like barcode scanning or a recipe library, keep the food app that has them and let its totals flow in through Apple Health. The guide to adaptive energy estimates covers the method in more depth.