What is the difference when logging a Food vs a Meal

ajohmar52

When do I create a Food? When do I create a meal?

ajohmar52

Thank you, it helps provide additional clarification on how to use MFP logs

springlering62

Welcome to MFP @ajohmar52

Yeah, half the battle is learning the lingo, isn’t it?

TBH it’s anything you want to frame it to be.

But for me, a “food” is an individual ingredient, like a tablespoon of honey, or a serving of cottage cheese.

I no longer use the “recipe” function, because it’s inflexible for my purposes, but many here do.

For me, a “meal”’is a combination of foods I’ve stored. For example, tonight we will be having Pecan Chicken, which is chicken breast dredged in pecan meal, Bisquick, salt pepper and paprika, with a little margarine on top, and baked until a nice crust forms.

I have that saved as a meal under the name Pecan Chicken. When I pull it up, I can save it (or a fraction of it, since I only eat .50% of the meal) directly to my diary.

My diary is open. If you look at my dinner, you can see it logged there.

I’ve saved recipes as meals, as well as done a manual breakdown of a local restaurant’s Asian noodle bowl, and another’s cesar salad with double grilled chicken, and a local fast food joint’s double hamburger and double onion rings meal. I’ve got them saved as a convenience.

You can use them creatively, however YOU choose, for whatever’s going to give you the best return on the time invested.

Lietchi

Meals are more similar to recipes than to foods.

For me a food is a single ingredient, or a single prepared food that I buy.
I only create foods when I don't find them in the food database: in my case mostly supermarket foods for which no one has created an entry yet, or there is an entry but so massively wrong it's easier to create a new entry than to modify an existing food.

Meals: combinations of foods. For example: my breakfast is often skyr yoghurt with Nestlé Fitness cereal - I save these as a meal. When I enter this meal in my diary, each food appears individually, so I can tweak the precise quantities of each food depending on my appetite etc.
I also use meals for prepared meals (other people might prefer to use the recipe builder for those): adding each ingredient for a dish, and then I can log fractions of the entire dish in my diary if I don't eat the whole dish in one sitting
(the recipe builder adds a single line to your diary with all the nutritional info, for example 1 serving of lasagne <-> using Meals, you'll see each individual ingredient of the lasagna in your diary)

ajohmar52

More ways to learn how to use this app, thank you😊!

springlering62

Lietchi wrote: »

(the recipe builder adds a single line to your diary with all the nutritional info, for example 1 serving of lasagne <-> using Meals, you'll see each individual ingredient of the lasagna in your diary)

I like meals for this reason. Sometimes I make tomatoe sauce or soup with no meat and it makes it easy to eliminate the meat line without having to reenter everything.

Or, my husband copies my diary entries every day. I eat more protein than him so it makes it easy for him to adjust his protein entry.

You can also copy a meal as a new meal, if you want to experiment with the ingredients, without altering the original meal.

I’ve been able to (sometimes drastically) reduce calories by having the freedom to play with a copied recipe in the meals area that way.

I made some terrific shortbread biscuits that way for Memorial Day. Definitely planning a do-over on those. They came out to about 60 calories apiece and were actually better with jam than as strawberry shortbread.