Getting Started with Piehole

Piehole is a calorie tracking app that gets out of your way. Log food by searching, scanning a barcode, or snapping a photo. Ask the AI advisor anything about nutrition. See your progress at a glance.

Here’s how to get up and running in five minutes.

Create your account

Download Piehole from the App Store and open it. Tap Sign Up, enter your email address and a password, and you’re in.

No subscription required to get started. The AI advisor has a generous free daily limit — enough to test the waters before committing.

Log your first food

Switch to the Today tab. Tap the + Add Food button.

Start typing the name of a food — say, “Greek yogurt.” Piehole searches three databases at once:

• Your Foods — things you’ve logged before, sorted by how often you eat them
• USDA Foods — 7,800+ entries from the USDA SR Legacy database
• Open Food Facts — millions of packaged products from around the world

Tap a result to pre-fill the details, adjust if needed, then tap Add.

Ask the AI advisor

Head to the Piehole tab (the home screen). Type a question in the box at the bottom — something like “Is a Chipotle burrito bowl a good lunch on a cut?”

The AI knows your calorie goal and health profile, so answers are personalized, not generic. It’ll tell you straight whether something fits your day.

You can also:

• Snap a photo — tap the camera icon inside the text box to analyze a meal or menu
• Search a restaurant — tap the search icon to look up menu items and get a breakdown
• Tap a suggestion — the app surfaces rotating prompts tailored to the time of day

Set up your profile

Tap Settings → Edit Profile. Walk through the 5-step wizard:

1. Basic info — age, sex, height, weight
2. Goal — target weight and activity level
3. Health conditions — optional; helps the AI give better advice
4. Preferences & allergies — what you avoid, what you prefer
5. Done — your calorie goal and TDEE are calculated automatically

Piehole uses the Mifflin-St Jeor formula (or Katch-McArdle if you enter body fat percentage) to estimate your total daily energy expenditure, then sets a calorie deficit or surplus based on your goal.

Scan a barcode

In the Add Food flow, tap Scan Barcode (iOS only). Point your camera at any UPC or EAN barcode on a food package. Piehole looks up the product in Open Food Facts and pre-fills the nutrition data.

Barcode scanning is not available on web — use search instead.

What’s next

Once you’ve logged a few days, check the Calendar tab to see your history as a color-coded grid. Green days are on-target, red days are over.

Track your weight in the Today tab to watch the trend line move.

The more you use Piehole, the smarter it gets — your personal food library grows with every entry, and frequently-eaten foods float to the top of search results.