Confusing

esthercowan10
esthercowan10 Posts: 2 Member
I've been using the app for just over 2 weeks now and whilst I'm finding my way around (eventually) I'm still struggling with a few things. It's so different from NutraCheck! My question relates on recording. I made a recipe tonight and I've divided into 6 portions. How do I record that in the app? It doesn't seem to give me an option for recording it simply as grams - it seems to be if I had half the recipe I'd be logging it as 0.5 etc. Help!

Replies

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,632 Member
    If you use the recipe builder to record the recipe, what I do is set the number of servings to the number of grams the total finished recipe weighs. MFP will give some kind of "that's a big number, do you mean it" message - I forget the actual text, but that's the gist. If you continue, it will let you add the recipe that way. Then, when I eat some of the recipe, I just put the number of grams I eat into the number of servings in my diary, and it does the math.

    If you use the meals feature or some other way of inputting the recipe, you might not have an option other than the 1/6 of recipe = 0.166 of the food.

    If I eat the whole thing myself eventually, I don't worry about each portion being exact. (My body doesn't reset at midnight, even though MFP does. As long as I account for all of the calories eventually, that works fine.) If I share that food with others, it can matter more to be precise, of course.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 8,691 Member
    edited May 13
    I save meals and recipes as one serving. If a pan of lasagna cuts up into 20 pieces, then I log .05 servings.

    It all works out in the end.

    BTW, I find the recipes function to be very inflexible. I save recipes under the meals tab. That way I have the ability to copy a meal if I’m tinkering with it. It’s also easier to see the ingredients and quantities, and adjust as needed. For example, if I’m making my usual beans soup, I can easily adjust the amount of onions, chopped celery, etc.

    I also like that when adding a meal (or a fraction of a meal) to my diary, it plugs in individual ingredients instead of a lump sum for “bean soup”.

    My husband copies meals from my diary to his. I eat way more protein than he does, so we can easily adjust as needed. Or, if I make tomato soup with chicken sausage, he always picks the darn stuff out because he doesn’t like it. So it’s easier for him to swipe left and just remove the chicken sausage.

    “Meals” is just easier to work with.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 8,691 Member
    And it’ll get easier. I promise.

    It’s like any thorough software. Ya gotta learn the nooks and crannies of it to use it efficiently.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,458 Member
    I agree with springlering62 on the Meals vs Recipes.

    "Meals" is a much better and easier tool, IMO.

    I do use "Recipes" if it's something like spaghetti sauce that has a lot of ingredients but that is made to a recipe that doesn't change much. Same with other sauces, salsas, potato salad, and dressings. Those are the only things I use the Recipe function for.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,632 Member
    Yeah, I pretty much only use the Recipe function for very structured things I will repeat pretty much exactly, Meals for things that are more variable.

    But if OP wants to set serving size in grams, Recipes is the feature that will let a person do that directly.
  • esthercowan10
    esthercowan10 Posts: 2 Member
    Thank you. So helpful. :)
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,098 Member
    I use meals mainly for things that I prepare one serving at a time for an individual meal, often with a number of things I might swap in and out each time (e.g., smoothies, oatmeal with all the various things I might mix in, meals fron places with pick-and-choose options, like Chipotle, where I might have chicken and black beans one time and pork and rice another). It's easy (to me) to save all the ingredients I use sometimes, and just delete the ones I don't use when I log it.

    I use recipes when I make something that will be eaten over several meals and the ingredients are all mixed together (soups, stews, casseroles, breads and other baked goods), so they're not going to change until I cook it again (and maybe not then). I don't find any great difficulty in editing a recipe of this type, and logging in grams is much easier for me than logging some fraction of a meal