A Meal Template is a starting point for a meal you repeat. A Day Template brings together a full day of meals. CORPUS supports creating and applying both, so familiar food does not have to be rebuilt from scratch each time. [1]
The useful question is simple: what actually repeats? If breakfast stays much the same while lunch and dinner change, start with the meal. If the whole day follows a familiar pattern, a Day Template may be a better fit.
When one meal repeats
Consider this invented example: breakfast is 40 g of oats, 150 g of yogurt and 100 g of berries. Lunch might be a sandwich on Monday, leftovers on Tuesday and soup on Wednesday. Dinner changes too. These foods and amounts are examples, not dietary recommendations.
Breakfast is the repeating part of that routine. A meal-sized starting point fits it without making assumptions about the rest of the day. You still need to check the foods and amounts for the breakfast you actually eat.
If you use 200 g of yogurt today instead of 150 g, the familiar meal name does not make those portions the same. If you skip the berries, that is another difference to account for. Reuse saves repeated entry; it does not tell you what was on the plate.
When the whole day repeats
Now imagine two days with the same breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and drinks, including the same amounts. A whole-day starting point fits that wider pattern. CORPUS’s public version history describes Day Templates as saved full-day meal templates. [1]
Before treating two days as equivalent, compare their contents. “Sandwich for lunch” could mean different bread, fillings, sides or portions. A matching meal name alone is not enough to establish a matching day.
If breakfast and dinner repeat but lunch changes substantially, use the smaller repeating unit as a starting point for deciding what to reuse. The aim is to save familiar work without carrying yesterday’s assumptions into today’s record.
Check what changed before relying on the record
Use this short comparison whenever you reuse a familiar pattern:
Check the foods: was anything swapped, added or left out?
Check the amounts: did a portion change, even if the meal kept the same name?
Check the occasion: does the record describe this meal or day, rather than just the saved plan?
You do not need a different template for every small variation to understand the distinction. The template is the reusable starting point; the food record is your account of a particular occasion. Keep those two roles separate when checking whether the record is complete.
Start with the pattern you can recognize and check easily. One familiar meal can be enough. Reusing a whole day becomes useful when the whole day genuinely repeats. Either way, the value comes from doing less repeated work while preserving the details that changed.
Sources & further reading
CORPUS — public App Store description and version history. Accessed 2026-09-30.
Drafted with AI assistance and checked in a separate automated editorial review. This article has not received human or medical review. Our editorial standards.