New to MFP

jordkang

Hello, middle aged man trying to retain muscle and lose beer belly. Sound familiar? Have tried a few "diets" and apps and made minimal progress. Question with app...if I log breakfast and lunch, can app recommend dinner ideas based on my nutrient goals? Thanks for the support.

AnnPT77

I don't know of a feature like that in MFP.

What I'd say is this:

First, the nutrient goals don't have to be precisely exact every single day. Pretty close on average over a few days to a week is fine. The MFP phone/tablet app even has nutrition view that will show you weekly numbers.

Second, if you log your breakfast and lunch for a while, you'll start to see how your normal eating patterns in those meals stack up against your goals. You'll also begin to see which foods you enjoy eating will best supply which nutrients. You can begin to use that knowledge to tweak your routine dinner eating patterns (or even shift details in breakfast/lunch) to accomplish your nutritional goals in a way that keeps you full and happy while eating foods you enjoy.

Another truth in this is that you don't need to hit all the goals right away: You can take some time working at it, as long as you're not already diagnosed with some diet-relevant health condition or nutrient deficiency.

In my opinion, one of the great things about calorie counting as a weight-management approach is that we can find new, personalized routine eating and activity habits that not only get us to a healthy weight, but that also are enjoyable (ideally) or at least tolerable/practical enough to keep us at a healthy weight long term.

Many people find maintaining the healthy weight harder than losing it in the first place. Focusing on personalization and habits can help make maintenance easier. (Where I'm coming from: I'm in year 8 of maintaining, after about 30 years of overweight/obesity pre-loss.)

Best wishes!

P.S. If you're stressed about this in the short run, something like this might help.



There are other versions on the web, if you do a search "macro cheat sheet" or "what to eat for macros". The one above is an example from a random web site (ownyoureating), but I'm not particularly endorsing that site (I know nothing about it). It's all kind of straightforward information; the sites may differ a little, but they'll have a lot of overlap. It's just a guide, not a prescription/proscription.

nossmf

Welcome, @jordkang!

Unfortunately, as Ann said, the app will not make recommendations to you. What it WILL do is show you how many calories you have left for the day, along with protein and whatever other nutrient you want it to show.

What good is this information? Let's say I know how many calories and nutrients are in two different possible dinner options. If dinner A would put me over calories while dinner B would fit right in, I may elect to use dinner B tonight and save dinner A for a night when breakfast/lunch leave me with more calories to play with.

A real-world example would be if I can't decide between eating a hamburger or a piece of baked fish. If lunch was pizza at the office party, I may choose the fish for dinner and save the hamburger for the next day when I have a sandwich at my desk instead.

How do I know the stats about dinners A vs B (or C, D and beyond)? By pre-logging foods, or entering foods BEFORE you actually eat them. I can log a food as if I ate it at dinner, look to see if I like the results, and either keep it there as a model to eat (tweaking after if something changed), or remove it entirely and replace the entry with something else.

Doing this item-by-item can be time consuming, but one feature the site allows is to save a set of foods together as "my meal". Enter everything once, save as a meal, and then on a future date you click to enter food, select "my meals" and which saved option you want to enter, and poof! One button click, the site remembers everything that was in your meal.

I almost always do this type of planning-ahead to figure out which set of leftovers to take to work for lunch, based upon which dinner I have planned for the evening.