Obsidian Foodiary (Bases) 🥪 🍎 🪵

This repo contains an example Obsidian vault that automatically calculates calories, protein, fat, carbs, and water — both for each individual meal and for the whole day. No more crunching numbers by hand.

Everything is built on plain Obsidian Bases, with a bit of automation from the Templater plugin.

🚀 Getting started

1. Install Templater

Enable community plugins in your vault and install Templater.

2. Configure Templater

[!tip] The repo already includes a Templater settings file, so you'll probably be good to go out of the box.

Set the following options:

Template folder location — choose the Templates folder
Trigger Templater on new file creation — enable
Folder templates — set up for two folders:
- Products: Templates/Product.md
- Records: Templates/Record.md

3. Create product cards

Product cards are individual notes where you store nutrition info for each food item.

Product properties (created automatically by Templater when you make a new file):

calories — calories per unit
protein — protein content
fat — fat content
carbs — carbohydrates
water — water content
unit — unit of measurement (g, ml, piece)
unit_size — the size of the unit the nutrition is given for (for example, 100 for grams or 1 for per piece/serving)

If the product is measured in pieces, it's convenient to specify unit_size as 1 (see example). If it's measured in grams (see example), then use 100.

[!tip] In this example vault, product cards live in the Products folder, but you can keep them anywhere you like.

4. Log your meals

Each meal is a separate note in the Records folder. The easiest way to create them is by pressing New right in the base view.

Meal note properties (also created automatically by Templater):

day — date of the meal (auto-filled with today's date)
product — link to the product card
quantity — how much you ate (in the same units as in the product card; e.g. 2 pieces or 150 grams)
timestamp — time / timestamp (used for sorting, auto-filled)

[!tip] I use the Meld Calc plugin to quickly calculate net food weight (for example, subtracting the weight of a plate from the total).

👀 How to view your data

The Diary.base file has three configured views:

All — all records for all time, grouped by day, with total calories/macros/water per day
Today — only today's entries
Yesterday — entries from yesterday

Open the base, switch views as needed, and you'll see your daily stats at a glance.

🛠️ How to customize it

Let's say you want to track fiber as well.

1. Add a property to product cards

Add a new property to existing product cards and to the product template:

---
calories:
protein:
fat:
carbs:
fiber:
water:
unit: g
unit_size: 100
aliases:
---

2. Add a formula to the base

Formula text:

(
    link(product).asFile().properties.fiber
    /
    link(product).asFile().properties.unit_size
    *
    quantity
).round()

3. Add a column to the view

Add a column to the first base view using the formula you created in the previous step.

To see the sum for the new column, click its bottom area and select the Sum function.

[!note] This is a custom summing function I wrote myself, because the standard one apparently can't be applied to columns whose values are generated by formulas.

That's it — now just add a column to all relevant base views, and everything will work. Easy as pie — just don't forget to log it.

ObsidianFoodiaryBases