Bolus’s approach to nutrition

Bolus decides your week of food before the week starts, and works the nutrition out from the meals you actually eat. This page sets out what that food is built around, why it is organised that way, and how to read the Food Quality card on the Insights tab.

The short version

Bolus is trying to get you eating balanced food, built around the UK government’s dietary recommendations, week after week. Not a perfect day, and not a number you hit. A run of weeks where good food kept happening, because the deciding and the shopping had already been done.

Bolus is a programme. The week is set up before it starts, and then the next one after that.

What the food is built around

The targets Bolus holds your food against are the UK government’s dietary recommendations. Fibre at 30g a day. Saturated fat as a limit to stay under. Protein as a floor to clear. Those are not our figures, and we have not adjusted them to suit ourselves.

One goal is ours: 30 different plants a week. The card says so where it appears, so you always know which figures are official and which are Bolus’s own.

The full list, and what each figure is used for, is on where our guidance comes from. Anything worked out rather than quoted is labelled there.

The week is decided before it starts

Meals chosen, portions set, and a shopping list built to match, all before the week begins. You shop once.

That timing is the whole design. Picture six o’clock on a Wednesday: you are tired, nothing came out of the freezer this morning, the fridge has half an onion and some yoghurt in it, and dinner has to exist in twenty minutes. Nothing you could have known that afternoon helps you. That is a supply problem, and supply problems are solved by shopping, days earlier, which is exactly where Bolus does the work.

So the choice that decides Wednesday’s dinner gets made at the start of the week, when it is easy, rather than at six o’clock, when it is not.

Why it keeps going

Eating well is not usually lost in a single decision. It goes when keeping something up gets expensive, week after week, and one hard week takes the whole thing down with it.

So Bolus asks nothing of you daily. You mark meals as you go, and that is the extent of it. If a night falls over, you mark the meal as eaten out or skipped, Bolus moves the rest of the week around, and nothing is lost. There is no budget to spend down and no streak to break.

Over a few months the aim is that eating this way stops feeling like something you are running and starts feeling like how you eat.

Why there is no calorie target

Calories are on the Food Quality card, worked out for you. What is not there is a daily calorie figure to hit, and Bolus never asks you to log what you ate.

A calorie target only means something if the counting continues, and counting is a daily task. That part has been measured: a decade-long review of research on calorie-counting apps, in adults living with obesity or a weight-related condition, found the same shape study after study. In one trial it covers, people logged on about five days a week in the first month, nearer one day a week across the two months that followed, and none at all once the study ended. Every app the review looked at showed adherence falling away over time.

There is a second cost, and it is the one people feel. A week you stopped logging looks exactly like a week that went badly, because both come out as a run of empty days, and a gap in the record reads as failure whether or not anything went wrong. Bolus has no gap to leave, so a hard week spoils nothing.

That is not a claim that calorie counting cannot work. It is what we built around: nothing here depends on you keeping up a daily task.

What the Food Quality card shows

The Food Quality card is built only from the Bolus meals you actually ate. Meals you ate out or skipped are never counted against it, so a busy week cannot drag it down. It is a picture of the food you had, not a score for the week you had.

Here is how to read what is on it.

Fibre, 30g a day. The number on that card most worth your attention. It is the same figure for everyone, and it is the one most people in this country fall short on. Meals built around vegetables, whole grains, beans and lentils are how it gets met, and that is most of what Bolus plans.

Saturated fat is a ceiling. It is a limit to stay under, so lower is the good direction.

Protein is a floor, not a bullseye. The reference figure is the intake that covers nearly everyone’s needs, so comfortably past it is a pass rather than an overshoot. When a goal has been reached the card says so, reading “55.5g met” instead of “of 55.5g”. Targets are set by sex, so your own figures may differ from that example.

Calories and carbohydrate are shown as numbers with nothing attached. You can see what you ate, and there is no target under either one.

Unsaturated fat has no target because there is no UK government figure for it in any framing. No intake goal, no upper limit, and no quantified replacement target. The guidance is to swap saturated fat for unsaturated fat, but nothing says how much. So the card shows the number and leaves the space beneath it empty, rather than inventing a figure and presenting it as official. The saturated fat limit already carries that advice.

Plants, 30 a week. Bolus’s own goal, and the card says so. It is about variety rather than quantity, and it is the one figure counted across the whole week instead of day by day. Like everything else on the card, it counts only the plants in the Bolus meals you actually ate.

Portion size is your one dial. Small, regular or large, set once in Settings, and applied to every meal in the weeks Bolus builds for you after that. It is the whole of portion control here, and you only do it once.

Weight is reflected back, never graded. You can record it if you want to watch it over time. It is never a target, and nothing in Bolus scores you against it.

Bolus is a healthy eating programme for adults living with diabetes or pre-diabetes. It is not a medical device. It does not treat, diagnose or manage a condition, it never advises on insulin or medication, and it gives no clinical target numbers. Those belong with your GP or diabetes team, exactly as they do now.