Creating Recipes in My Fitness Pal

jfhancock2343

Creating recipes in MFP is a great shortcut for adding foods to your food diary. However, it is also a huge headache. The problem is that when you add a food to the recipe, the vast majority of the choices have inaccurate calorie counts and we don't get preview that information until we add that food to the recipe.

I was creating a recipe yesterday and I had to keep deleting it because the calorie information in the foods I was adding was wrong and the website wouldn't let me remove a single food item. I kept having to delete the whole recipe and start again.

Very frustrating, especially with long recipes. How do we encourage MFP to add a calorie preview?

HerbsandMore

If you are getting it from another site don't add anything just copy & paste the website and when you want that recipe it will bring you back to that website. If your copying your own recipes then yes it can be a challenge, it's all in the wording for example once I put in egg whites and I knew it was wrong so I put in the kind of egg whites, I got from a carton and that came out right. Hope this helps. I have no idea how to encourage them to do more, we have tried but the response is you can put your own info in your diary and then just pick from that which I have done a lot because our counts in Canada are different than the States just today I put in brown rice and the count was quite a bit lower than what my box said so I checked again and it seems that the rice in the States is 43 g. to 1/2 cup here it is 50 g. to half a cup. Hopefully you will get the hang of it.

mtaratoot

jfhancock2343 wrote: »

Creating recipes in MFP is a great shortcut for adding foods to your food diary. However, it is also a huge headache. The problem is that when you add a food to the recipe, the vast majority of the choices have inaccurate calorie counts and we don't get preview that information until we add that food to the recipe.

I was creating a recipe yesterday and I had to keep deleting it because the calorie information in the foods I was adding was wrong and the website wouldn't let me remove a single food item. I kept having to delete the whole recipe and start again.

Very frustrating, especially with long recipes. How do we encourage MFP to add a calorie preview?

It's almost humorous that we both started such a similar discussion at almost exactly the same time!

AnnPT77

I hope you know that you can edit (replace) a single ingredient in the recipe, at the point when it gives you the list of matched items? (Or do it later, in recipe edit.)

On the phone/tablet version of MFP, it should be fairly obvious how to do this, but if not, say so and I'll try to give more detailed info.

On web MFP, it's almost completely nonobvious how to do this. When it gives you the matched list, you need to hover your cursor over to the right of the ingredient you want to change/replace. When you do that, you should be able to find an otherwise-hidden set of options: "Edit Quantity" "Replace" "Remove".

The "Replace" option gives you a search box, so you can find an entry you like better. Usually it's a good idea to use a more specific search term (like "whole wheat flour" instead of "flour" or a brand name). If you change the search term to a synonym, you'll get different search results, until you find a replacement ingredient that's more accurate.

penguinmama87

If Ann's advice doesn't solve the issue, I will say that the most glitches I have ever come across with MFP occur using the recipe function. The good thing is that it usually doesn't last long and functionality returns within a few hours or the next day. But I have lost entire recipes, not been able to delete or replace ingredients or edit anything about them including the name, etc. It is very, very frustrating in the moment, but it doesn't last. It doesn't happen all the time or even frequently, but I do run into stretches of time when it's more frequent then all of a sudden resolves itself and everything is fine for weeks or months.

I assume there are weird code things going on in the background I don't need to bother myself with.

grandmajojo421

I used the MFP function today for the 1st time and am very disappointed in it. It did not count the sodium in a recipe correcctly at all. It also made errors on the carbs which are the 2 most important numbers I need. I can see others have similar issues. I have been using myfitness for quite some time but this is a very poor process Very disappointed in it.

penguinmama87

grandmajojo421 wrote: »

I used the MFP function today for the 1st time and am very disappointed in it. It did not count the sodium in a recipe correcctly at all. It also made errors on the carbs which are the 2 most important numbers I need. I can see others have similar issues. I have been using myfitness for quite some time but this is a very poor process Very disappointed in it.

I would recheck the ingredients - sometimes it can pull odd or incorrect entries, but you can "replace ingredient" with the correct ones. I like to cross-check with the USDA's Food Data Central (any items listed under the "SR Legacy" tab have entries in the MFP database.)

BarbaraHelen2013

penguinmama87 wrote: »

grandmajojo421 wrote: »

I used the MFP function today for the 1st time and am very disappointed in it. It did not count the sodium in a recipe correcctly at all. It also made errors on the carbs which are the 2 most important numbers I need. I can see others have similar issues. I have been using myfitness for quite some time but this is a very poor process Very disappointed in it.

I would recheck the ingredients - sometimes it can pull odd or incorrect entries, but you can "replace ingredient" with the correct ones. I like to cross-check with the USDA's Food Data Central (any items listed under the "SR Legacy" tab have entries in the MFP database.)

Absolutely! I sanity check every single ingredient when I import a recipe, replacing almost all of them with the brand (or supermarket name for fresh goods) checking the nutritional info is as complete as possible - there are limitations based on where in the world you live, as to what is listed on nutrition panels on goods.

The Recipe builder tool is as accurate as you choose to make it. Well worth the time taken the first time you build your recipe, as it ensures the most accurate results thereafter when you make the dish again - remember to edit with precise gram weights when remaking for best possible results. Not all onions weigh the same, for example!

drana325

Yeah. I was entering ingredients for my instant pot chicken curry. I put cloves as an Ingredient. I only use 4. For a weeks worth. It calculated 4000 calories for it. It kept picking up something about ground cloves. Then I tried cloves-spice…picked up on garlic cloves. I got a little annoyed and looked up patel bros cloves…and tried writing Lavang which is what we call it in my language. Nothing. At most a clove is 2 calories. NOT EVEN. So I tried to replace it with black pepper corn. Lol. Nnnope. Apparently whole black pepper corns aren’t ingredients.

So finally replaced both black pepper corn and cloves with cinnamon stick. Granted cinnamon sticks have way more calories than black pepper and cloves. But I’ll be damned…calorie count was far less than 4000.

BarbaraHelen2013

drana325 wrote: »

Yeah. I was entering ingredients for my instant pot chicken curry. I put cloves as an Ingredient. I only use 4. For a weeks worth. It calculated 4000 calories for it. It kept picking up something about ground cloves. Then I tried cloves-spice…picked up on garlic cloves. I got a little annoyed and looked up patel bros cloves…and tried writing Lavang which is what we call it in my language. Nothing. At most a clove is 2 calories. NOT EVEN. So I tried to replace it with black pepper corn. Lol. Nnnope. Apparently whole black pepper corns aren’t ingredients.

So finally replaced both black pepper corn and cloves with cinnamon stick. Granted cinnamon sticks have way more calories than black pepper and cloves. But I’ll be damned…calorie count was far less than 4000.

Next time try searching for ‘whole cloves’ - seems to bring up the right entries. 😊

Also, ‘black peppercorns’ brings up a number of correct entries. I didn’t try searching them as ‘pepper corns’ but it doesn’t surprise me if that doesn’t work so well! 🤷‍♀️