Suggestion: Improving Meal Logging

rsayle0530

I am brand new to MFP and just went through the process of logging my meals for a day. I found that the homemade meals were a bit more difficult to log than I would have liked. I ended up mostly logging the individual ingredients for each of the dishes I ate. Selecting individual ingredients is fine, but I don't want to have to do it every time for dishes that I regularly eat. This is where MFP's data modeling and personalization could be improved.

MFP's data model looks like [Meals]-"are composed of"-[Foods]. Users have the option to save [Meals] and save [Foods] as well as choose from the existing entries in the database to make logging easier and faster. This is great, but as I mentioned previously, I logged individual [Foods], which doesn't reflect what the dish was that I ate.

I propose the following enhancement: [Meals]-"are composed of"-[Dishes]-AND-[Foods]. Allow users to create [Dishes], which can be saved and selected to their meal log.

For example, suppose I eat a kale salad with tomatoes, pistachios, and a vinaigrette. It would be nice to be able to create and save a [Dish] with these components that I can later add to a [Meal]. That way, if I have a salad and say lemon chicken for dinner, I could select the salad as a [Dish] and lemon chicken as either another [Dish] or a [Food].

janejellyroll

This sounds pretty much like the recipe builder. Am I missing something?

tinkerbellang83

Yup you can find that already in the App - go to Recipes, Meals & Foods and tap Create a Recipe

In the web version you can find it under the Food tab.

heybales

You can also take a meal of ingredients and Create a Meal as suggested without even building a recipe.

Those can be updated if you change ingredient quantities.

cmriverside

yeah, I prefer saving as a "Meal" (Quick Tools on the FOOD entry page.)

Meals are awesome because when you add them the next time they auto-populate each ingredient on your FOOD diary so if (for instance) I decide I want extra extra cheese on that sandwich or if I decide I don't want that avocado on it, I just edit or delete that one ingredient with one click.

(That's what heybales just said, I'm just elaborating.)

heybales

Forgot about that extra benefit because I don't use that aspect, but I should for the few times it comes up.