Why I built Repeat Eat

I am a software developer, although mobile apps are not what I normally work on. Repeat Eat began as a small tool I built for myself.

Some time ago I was diagnosed with fatty liver disease and told that I needed to lose weight. I also have a family history of diabetes, so it was the wake-up call I needed to take my fairly sedentary lifestyle more seriously.

I decided to make regular physical activity part of my routine. Running and long walks were not for me, but swimming felt like something I could stick with. Apple Fitness helped me record my swims and see that I was making progress.

The frustrating part was food

I tried several calorie tracking apps and somehow disliked all of them. There were subscriptions, mandatory accounts, long onboarding questionnaires, gamification, features I did not need, and AI food recognition that was confidently wrong and difficult to correct. Some apps were not even available in my region.

For a while I used an AI chat as a food diary. It was convenient, but unreliable as a record. It mixed up different days, forgot meals, and occasionally added things I never ate. There was no useful way to look back at daily or weekly progress.

So I built the tool I wanted

I wanted a quick way to record familiar meals, correct individual items, and see approximate protein, fibre, and calorie totals. I did not want an account, a giant food database, or a food journal that depended on a particular AI service.

Repeat Eat grew from that idea: meals should be easy to repeat, estimates should stay editable, and the journal should remain useful without AI.

Between swimming regularly and paying more attention to what I ate, I turned both things into habits. Three months later I was 8 kg lighter, and after a follow-up examination my doctor told me that I no longer had fatty liver.