You are what you eat – as the age-old saying goes – so keeping track of what you shove into your gaping maw on a daily basis obviously makes good sense from a health perspective. The only trouble is it’s often tremendously difficult to keep on top of your diet if you have a particularly busy working and social life.

Meal Diary attempts to solve this little conundrum by allowing you to quickly input data about what food items you’ve consumed without having to sit for minutes specifying the boring details. While similar apps force you to submit all kinds of dull information – from the weight of the portion to the particular brand – Meal Diary streamlines the process of allowing you to approximate what you’ve eaten.

You simply select the meal type (breakfast, snack, lunch) and pick a portion size from small, medium or large. Meal Diary then awards you a predicted number of calories for that meal and adds it to your daily total.

Naturally calories are a two-way thing; performing regular exercise is going to burn them off. Therefore, you can also input information about what kind of activities you’ve been indulging in. Again, you can roughly quantify this to give Meal Diary an idea of how many calories need to be knocked off your score.

While it may sound enticingly like some kind of challenge-based video game, keeping tabs on your health is a serious business – and for this reason, Meal Diary ends up being totally ineffective. True, it’s blissfully easy to insert data about your exercise and food consumption, but because it’s done so arbitrarily, you’re not getting an accurate picture of your diet.

While the charts and graphs generated by Meal Diary will obviously give you a rough idea of your present state of health, it’s more than likely that you’ll be fully aware of how effective your exercise/calorie intake ratio is regardless. These kinds of applications require far more accurate information, and sadly that is not something you can do with a couple of button presses.

While it’s big on convenience and simplicity, Meal Diary is ultimately a complete waste of time. Stick with the more laborious diet-focused applications – they might be a bore to use but they’re more likely to give you a better idea of your current health than this.