Meal planning?

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cucumbercupcake
cucumbercupcake Posts: 4 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I'm looking for a way to lay out my food for a week at a time, with menu, shopping list, and make sure it fits my mfp goals.

Is that available in mfp? How do you do it?

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  • frhaberl
    frhaberl Posts: 145 Member
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    I use an app (subscription) called Plan to Eat for my meal planning and MFP for my calorie tracking I would LOVE to combine the two, or have an easy import of recipes from Plan to Eat into MFP.

    Benefits of Plan to Eat:
    • Allows you to import recipes from web sites as well as enter manually
    • Allows modification of recipes that have been imported
    • Keeps the link to the imported recipe so it's easy to go back to the original
    • Allows you to share recipes with other Plan to Eat subscribers (it's how my adult son gets his favorite "the way mom makes it" recipes)
    • Has a database of recipes to pull from (haven't used this much)
    • Has a nutrition calculator - it's a beta testing feature, so I don't rely on the numbers it gives me.....yet
    • Puts together a shopping list based on your meal plan that can be divided into multiple stores and added to. It even puts items you frequently move to a certain store in there automatically after a couple times (I get my chicken at Costco, so it always puts the chicken from recipes on my Costco list).
    Cons of Plan to Eat:
    • You have to pay for it. I think the subscription is $40/year, but I always renew mine around Thanksgiving when they have a 50% off sale.
    • Until you figure out how to change the settings, the shopping list is compiled from Sunday through Saturday, so items you put on the following Sunday meal plan get left off your shopping list.
    • Some recipes from some web sites don't pull in completely/correctly, so you have to manually correct or enter the ingredients.
    • No way to directly export recipes to MFP. For recipes I pulled from the web, I grab the URL from Plan to Eat and paste it into MFP, but that doesn't carry over my modifications to the recipe and I have to manually edit most of the time.

    All in all, I feel like these two apps work really well for me. Once I got most of the meals from my Plan to Eat rotation into the MFP recipes it was pretty easy to line up a week of meals in MFP and see where I was landing calorie/nutrient wise and know where I might want to adjust portion sizes or add/subtract snacks.

    Looking forward to hearing what others do!

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