What is a day template in Base?

A saved arrangement of meals and foods at particular hours, covering a whole day. Logging it writes every item to its hour in one action. It is the difference between twenty taps and one for someone whose weekdays look broadly the same.

How is a day template different from a saved meal?

A meal is one eating occasion and logs to whichever hour you are on. A template is a whole day and logs every item to its own hour. Templates are built out of meals, so the two compose rather than compete.

Can I edit a day after logging a template?

Yes, and you normally will. A template is a starting point, not a claim about what you ate. Logging one writes ordinary entries you can then adjust, add to or remove exactly as if you had logged them by hand.

How many templates should I have?

Usually two or three: a training day, a rest day, and possibly a long-session day. More than four and choosing between them costs more than the taps it saves, which defeats the point.

Does the template screen show whether the day hits my target?

Yes. Each template card shows its totals against today's calorie target with the difference, coloured green when it is within about 100 calories and amber when it is not, so you can see at a glance whether the day you are about to log is the right size.

Log a Whole Day of Food With One Tap

When a template is the right tool

Templates pay off in proportion to how repetitive your eating is.

Your pattern	Best tool
Same breakfast, varied rest of day	Saved meals
Weekdays broadly identical	A weekday template
Training days and rest days differ	Two templates
Genuinely different every day	Saved meals and search

Most people who train seriously fall into the middle two rows, because eating consistently is a large part of how the training works.

Building one

Templates are assembled from foods and meals with an hour attached to each. Build the meals first — see saving a meal — then arrange them.

The screen lives behind the Food Log's hamburger menu, under Templates, and also in Settings under Day Templates.

A day template with every item listed at its hour, and the day's totals held against today's calorie target. The difference is shown so you know whether the day you are about to log is the right size.

Each card shows:

The template's name and its totals
Every item, with its hour and its calories
The difference against today's target, coloured by whether it lands close
One button that logs the whole thing

The target comparison is the useful part

That difference line is what turns a template from a convenience into a planning tool:

template total   3,180 kcal
today's target   3,240 kcal
difference          −60 kcal   → within tolerance, green

Because the calorie target moves with measured expenditure, the same template lands differently on different days. A rest day and a day with a two-hour ride can differ by 800 calories, and the template that was exactly right on Tuesday is 800 short on Saturday.

Seeing that before logging is the point. It tells you the template is the wrong size for today and by how much, which is a far more useful thing to know at 8am than at midnight.

Logging one, then correcting it

Pressing the log button writes ordinary food entries. They are not linked to the template afterwards and carry no special status.

That is deliberate: a template is a prediction of your day, and predictions need correcting. Log the template in the morning, then adjust as the day actually happens — add the extra coffee, remove the lunch you skipped. Both are ordinary edits, covered in editing and deleting food entries.

The alternative design — a template that stays linked and updates itself — sounds tidier and is worse, because it makes a logged day something other than a record of what you ate.

How many to keep

Two or three.

The cost of a template is the decision of which one to use. At two, that decision is free. At six it is a menu, and a menu at 6am in a dark kitchen is exactly the friction templates existed to remove.

A reasonable set:

Training day — your normal day, sized for a lifting session
Rest day — several hundred calories lighter
Long session day — if you have a weekly long run or ride

What templates do not cover

Micronutrients are inherited, not invented. A template's micronutrient contribution is whatever its component foods carry. Items entered through Quick Add carry none, so a template built largely from Quick Adds will log a full day of calories and almost no micronutrient coverage. That shows up honestly on the micronutrient screen as a low coverage figure rather than as a shortfall.

Portion drift is invisible. A template logs the portions it was built with. If your standard bowl has quietly grown, the template will keep reporting the old size indefinitely — and because adaptive maintenance is computed from logged intake, that error compounds into your measured maintenance rather than staying local to one day.

Re-weigh your staples occasionally and update the underlying meals.

Common mistakes

Building a template before knowing what you actually eat. Log normally for a week first. A template built from what you intend to eat is a meal plan, and meal plans are not what the maths needs.

Logging the template and never correcting it. This is the failure mode that makes templates worse than manual logging: a perfect record of a day you did not have.

Keeping six templates. Choosing costs more than typing.

Assuming the template adapts to the target. It does not. It is a fixed day of food, and the difference line exists precisely because the target moves and the template does not.

Building templates entirely from Quick Adds. Calories will be right and micronutrient coverage will be near zero.

Forgetting weekends. The most common gap in a template-driven log, and the one that biases measured maintenance hardest, because unlogged days are simply absent from the average rather than counted as light.

What to do next

Log normally for one week, then look at what your weekdays have in common. Build one template from that, and check its difference line against today's target before you use it.