Do People Log More Calories on Weekends? Data by Country
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Perplexity We looked at what NutriScan users logged on each day of the week, by country. A day counts when the user logged at least 3 meals totalling 800 to 6,000 kcal. This page gives the median calories for those days, how many complete days people logged on a Saturday against a Monday, and the full method. The data comes from NutriScan's own app, and the Privacy section says what was and was not used.
Key findings
All figures are medians over complete logged days, with the country taken from each user's timezone setting. Data runs to 2026-11-01.
| # | Finding |
|---|---|
| 1 | UK users logged a median of 1,685 kcal on Saturdays against 1,551 kcal on Mondays, a 9% gap (373 and 472 complete days from 100 and 121 users). It is the largest weekend gap among the countries with enough users. |
| 2 | German users logged a median of 1,890 kcal on Saturdays and 1,886 kcal on Sundays, against 1,786 to 1,816 kcal on weekdays, about 5% more (1,116 Saturday days from 313 users, 1,347 Monday days from 397 users). |
| 3 | In the US and France the weekend gap shrinks to 3 to 4%. US users logged 1,637 kcal on Saturday against 1,586 on Monday. French users logged 1,792 against 1,725. |
| 4 | Weekend eating goes partly unrecorded. US users logged 29% fewer complete days on Saturday than on Monday (1,079 against 1,512). German users logged 17% fewer, French users 22% fewer and Spanish users 35% fewer. |
Median calories per logged day, by weekday
Median kcal of complete logged days. Every cell below has 82 or more users. The next table gives the sample behind each number.
| Country | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 1,586 | 1,628 | 1,610 | 1,586 | 1,631 | 1,637 | 1,632 |
| Germany | 1,786 | 1,791 | 1,789 | 1,808 | 1,816 | 1,890 | 1,886 |
| France | 1,725 | 1,739 | 1,788 | 1,785 | 1,779 | 1,792 | 1,773 |
| United Kingdom | 1,551 | 1,579 | 1,596 | 1,612 | 1,632 | 1,685 | 1,647 |
| Spain | 1,601 | 1,699 | 1,710 | 1,705 | 1,723 | 1,694 | 1,731 |
Spain is the one country where Saturday sits below most weekdays: 1,694 kcal against 1,699 to 1,723 kcal on Tuesday to Friday. The Spanish Monday median of 1,601 kcal is about 100 kcal below Tuesday to Friday, a larger gap than any weekend effect there. In the smaller cells (France, UK, Spain) day-to-day noise is about 50 to 100 kcal, so gaps under 5% there are within noise.
Sample behind each cell
Each cell shows complete logged days, then distinct users.
| Country | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 1,512 / 539 | 1,534 / 504 | 1,486 / 470 | 1,378 / 448 | 1,264 / 431 | 1,079 / 380 | 1,090 / 409 |
| Germany | 1,347 / 397 | 1,350 / 379 | 1,359 / 392 | 1,304 / 372 | 1,186 / 339 | 1,116 / 313 | 1,137 / 365 |
| France | 454 / 117 | 444 / 100 | 438 / 103 | 435 / 97 | 393 / 82 | 353 / 82 | 360 / 96 |
| United Kingdom | 472 / 121 | 474 / 134 | 468 / 119 | 433 / 122 | 415 / 108 | 373 / 100 | 372 / 110 |
| Spain | 453 / 218 | 424 / 197 | 451 / 207 | 420 / 179 | 344 / 148 | 295 / 136 | 293 / 136 |
Fewer complete days on Saturday
The same logs show how many complete days people record. We compared Saturday with Monday.
| Country | Complete days on Monday | Complete days on Saturday | Fewer on Saturday |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 1,512 | 1,079 | 29% |
| Germany | 1,347 | 1,116 | 17% |
| France | 454 | 353 | 22% |
| United Kingdom | 472 | 373 | 21% |
| Spain | 453 | 295 | 35% |
People who stop logging on a heavy day pull the weekend median down, so the real weekend gap is likely larger than the medians above.
Methodology
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Source | Meals logged in the NutriScan app by users who set a timezone, read from the app database on 2026-11-01. All data to that date. Sample meals are excluded, and so are deleted accounts. Where an account had more than one settings row, the latest row was used. |
| Country | Taken from the timezone setting only. US: America/New_York, Chicago, Los_Angeles, Denver, Phoenix and Detroit. Germany: Europe/Berlin. France: Europe/Paris. United Kingdom: Europe/London. Spain: Europe/Madrid and Atlantic/Canary. Canada (America/Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver) also cleared the floor and is in the CSV, but its medians swing from 1,585 to 1,712 kcal with no weekend pattern, so this page does not draw findings from it. |
| Meal filter | Meals with 1 to 4,000 kcal. |
| Day | A user's local calendar date, from the timezone setting. A user-day is complete when it has 3 or more meals and 800 to 6,000 kcal in total. Meals logged for a past day with a midnight timestamp stay in, because they belong to the day they were logged for. |
| Statistic | The median kcal across complete user-days, for each country and weekday. Monday is day 1. |
| Floor | A country and weekday cell is published only when it has 50 or more distinct users. Austria, Switzerland and Brazil had 44 users or fewer in every cell, and all their cells are left out. |
| Limits | Logged days only: skipped days are invisible, so the data cannot show how much people eat on days they do not log. Users who log are not a random sample of a country. Calories come from the app's food database and photo estimates, so they carry the error of those estimates. The timezone setting is a proxy for country, and a traveller can sit in the wrong one. Cells of 82 to 218 users in France, the UK and Spain move by 50 to 100 kcal from day to day. |
| Conflict of interest | NutriScan makes the calorie tracking app that produced this data. |
Privacy
This page uses the timezone setting only. It does not use city or state, and it does not use any name, email or other account detail. Every number is a median or a count for a whole country and weekday, and no cell has fewer than 50 users. Nothing in the page or the CSV can identify a person.
Dataset
Download the weekday medians (CSV). It has one row per country and weekday that passed the 50-user floor (42 rows for six countries): country, weekday, weekday number, median kcal, complete days and distinct users. NutriScan releases the table under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0); reuse it with credit and a link to this page.
To cite this page: NutriScan, "Do People Log More Calories on Weekends? Data by Country", nutriscan.app/research/weekend-calories, published 2026-11-01. The chart carries a credit line and can be reused with a link back.
Related research: Which calorie apps ChatGPT recommends, by country and Fast-food calories by country.
Where NutriScan fits
NutriScan works from a photo: you photograph the meal, check the items and portions it finds, and get calories, protein, carbs and fat. Each meal also gets an A to E meal grade, so you can compare two meals at a glance. The free plan includes 5 AI scans a week. Premium costs about $59 a year and removes the weekly limit. NutriScan has 150k+ downloads and a 4.6-star rating.