The byte is the unit used to measure the amount of time a food item takes to digest. A player can digest up to 24 bytes of food per day. After eating a food item, each Reduction fought digests one byte for both players involved in the fight.

Remaining bytes can be seen in the item sub-menu of the phone menu. A player's bytes are displayed in a 6 X 4 table of squares. When a player is given an item to eat, empty squares in the table are filled with green, yellow or red corresponding to the number of bytes in the food item eaten. Green, yellow or red squares indicate bytes that are digesting while grey squares indicate bytes that have already been digested. As the player fights reductions, the colored squares will be converted to grey ones to show how much has been digested.

Players always have room to digest 6 more bytes, so it is usually benefitial to eat large items first and then consume food of six or less bytes when only 6 bytes of space are free. If the player has the (S) Hollow Leg Sticker the player will always have 24 bytes available.

Trivia

• When the game clock proceeds to the next day (11:59 P.M. to 12:00 A.M.), digested bytes (grey) are emptied. However, if the player plays during this time, the used bytes will not reset. If you don't have Hollow Leg yet, be careful not to play during this time frame.
• The name byte is a double entendre. In the real world, the act of a living being sinking its teeth into an object is biting (the root word being bite). A byte, however, is a digital unit of information, possibly referencing the fact that The World Ends With You is a video game made up entirely of digital data.