It’s uncomfortable for me to wear smartwatches because of how much time I spend typing and playing on my keyboard. The wrist rest and the watch band are always at odds.

Thankfully, my Oura Ring is comfortable and as inconspicuous as an ant. It smartly understands my habits, doesn’t vibrate, tracks my sleep, and now, nudges me to eat healthier.

It took about a month of daily use for the Oura app to analyze my sleep schedule and movement patterns. It’s good at condensing that data, and I was happy using the ring to track my sleep and daily calorie count.

However, I still felt like I was not using this smart ring to its fullest potential.

You don’t need a smart gadget to tell you that burning calories is great, and regaining them with proper meals is more important.

But after a month with the Oura Ring 4, I noticed the Log a Meal feature, sitting inside a sub-menu in the Oura app. It’s in the lower-right corner of the app inside the + icon, and it completely rewired my brain to eat healthy.

Oura farming

How to track your meals on the Oura app?

I started tracking my body’s energy reserves in the app by digging through the data, which the app buries in the Sleep and Readiness sections. It gave me a clear picture of why I was feeling energetic or tired.

Two weeks into weight training with the Ring 4, I got an itch to track my meals. Logging meals is straightforward. You either describe the meal with text, or take a photo and let the app judge the contents on your plate.

In my first month of using the Oura Ring 4, I completely ignored the Log a Meal feature on the Oura Ring app.

I ignored it because it doesn’t provide additional information such as estimated calories or meal suggestions. I knew the donut I had in the afternoon wasn’t healthy. I wanted to know how much sugar and calories I consumed.

The Oura app doesn’t gauge the calories from your plate. It can’t do so because judging calories from a photo is like climbing stairs with roller skates. You can do it, but it’s a bad idea.

It has a healthy ring to it

What happens after you log your meal?

Like an Instagram influencer, I took out my smartphone to photograph every meal I had, for nearly two months. It was tedious, but it kept me informed of what I was consuming.

People throw the word protein around a lot when weight training, but the Oura app nudges you to balance your meals.

I quickly realized that the answer to ‘healthy’ eating isn’t only about eating chicken and veggies on time. It’s also understanding how your body balances recovery and energy.

The app ranks each meal on its nutritional value. Limited is where all the sugary stuff goes. Meanwhile, Fair, Good, and Nutritious are where you’d typically want your meals to be.

Then the app takes all your meal data from the day and plots it on a graph. This is where I was completely hooked on the Oura app.

What impressed me was the meal description that it would add to my photos. These meal descriptions pinpoint the nutritional value and also suggest what I should eat to balance my meal.

The app nudged me to supplement the missing portions of my diet in relation to my exercise schedule. It would nudge me to eat nuts and fruits before a workout for stable evening energy.

If the meal was a bit carb-heavy, the app would nudge me to go for a walk to reduce the heaviness before bedtime.

A lot of times it felt like a strict headmaster offering suggestions to improve everything, but I slowly started to see how important it is.

Seeing the graph line teetering between Good and Nutritious is a great feeling. It gave me a great visual representation of my good eating habits.

If I misbehaved and had a few beers and one pizza, the graph line would plummet into the abyss called Limited.

Finding value in the subscription

Pony up for a good life

Oura’s $5.99 a month or $69.99 a year subscription pinches when I think about the cost of the hardware. However, now I pass it off as a health investment.

The meal logging feature, along with the sleep and readiness tracking, was very pivotal for my newfound health journey.

I have some qualms with its accuracy, though. It’s somewhat clever at detecting the meal items from my dish, but with some exotic dishes, it can get a bit carried away.

Seven out of ten times, I had to make some adjustments to the meal items it picked out from the photo.

Occasionally, the app would mistake Indian cottage cheese for potato, or regular chicken curry for Thai green curry. These are minor inconveniences, unless you’re a foodie.

I fancy switching to a new screenless tracker like the Google Fitbit Air or the Whoop band, but those require a subscription, albeit with a significantly lower total cost.

Though I’ve not used the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, the Fitbit Air, or the Oura Ring 5, I know the Google Health app that works with the Google Fitbit Air has a similar feature. It can go beyond Oura’s food recognition and take a guess at the estimated calories.

While I think that’s great, Oura’s strength isn’t knowing what’s on your plate; it’s knowing how to manage it mindfully and healthily.

Oura Ring 5
  •                 **Heart rate monitor**
  • Y
  •                 **Notification support**
  • N
  •                 **Battery life**
  • six-to-nine days
  •                 **Sensors**
  • Red/Green/Infrared LEDs, temperature sensor, accelerometer

The Oura Ring 5 is the world's smallest smart ring, and 40% smaller than the Oura Ring 4. It has an entirely new design on the underside, promising increased skin contact for better accuracy. It's made from titanium and available in a variety of finishes.