Questions about meals and friends' diaries

jcstevens74
jcstevens74 Posts: 2 Member
edited November 2024 in Getting Started
Just signed on yesterday and I am very excited about the potential for transformation using MFP. I was starting to wonder why there are 'Meals' defined (e.g. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack) when it seems easier to just list out everything as I eat it. Then I ran into the issue requested in many threads about sharing my diary with my wife so we don't have to double-enter (http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1071795/copying-from-a-friends-diary). The problem is that I can only copy meals to MFP from my wife's diary and not individual foods, so the 'Meals' concept makes a little more sense.

My question, then, is how best to use 'Meals'? If I try to copy my wife's breakfast, I get her creamer, her multivitamin, etc. Does this mean that, ideally, we would be entering only the main course in meals and add all sides, extras, etc. as Snacks? What if we have a snack in common and I don't want to manually enter that as well? How do other people handle Meals vs. Snacks?

Also... how do you get to the Community on the iOS app?

Regards,
Johnny

Replies

  • _runnerbean_
    _runnerbean_ Posts: 640 Member

    [/quote]Also... how do you get to the Community on the iOS app?[/quote]

    Welcome! I have never tried copying meals so can't answer your first question.
    I use the iOS app too- you can't link to community forums straight from the app. What I do is go to community forums list page on safari then set up a link to that page so I can click straight to it from the iOS apps page.
    good luck with using MFP- I love it!


  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,562 Member
    You can use between one and six meal slots, however you feel you want to organize them.

    As for the community, they just introduced it into the Android app last month, and the iOS one is coming soon, probably once they work out the bugs that were in the initial release.
  • HeidiCooksSupper
    HeidiCooksSupper Posts: 3,836 Member
    Arrange/name your meals however works for you. Mine are brunch, supper and snacks. Change them as you need to.
  • greaseswabber
    greaseswabber Posts: 238 Member
    I use breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks categories for Meals. Besides being able to copy meals, the program also organizes your most used foods. So mine has bananas and cereal near the top of the list for breakfast, and chicken breast and wine for dinner.

    If you copy your wife's meals and it has things you don't need like creamer, it's pretty easy to just delete the items you don't want after copying.
  • aylajane
    aylajane Posts: 979 Member
    edited January 2015
    "Meals" as in the menu item at the top (not the separations of eating times on the left) are just common groups of foods so you dont have to go pick all the pieces separately (i.e. If you eat a ham sandwich, broccoli with cheese and a soda for lunch every day, you just pick the "meal" and it adds all 3).

    That said, I never use meals - I just make a "recipe" instead with the same stuff. That way it adds only one line to my diary like "Regular ham/broccoli/chs/soda lunch".

    No clue about sharing with someone else though!
  • greaseswabber
    greaseswabber Posts: 238 Member
    I didn't realize you could share between people. That's cool. You can change the meal names, up to six different fields, under the settings menu on the diary page. Or you could have just one big meal by leaving all but one field blank. Then you could copy that "meal" (really just the whole day) to someone else using the quick tools --> copy to date method in your original link.
  • jcstevens74
    jcstevens74 Posts: 2 Member
    aylajane wrote: »
    "Meals" as in the menu item at the top (not the separations of eating times on the left) are just common groups of foods so you dont have to go pick all the pieces separately (i.e. If you eat a ham sandwich, broccoli with cheese and a soda for lunch every day, you just pick the "meal" and it adds all 3).

    That said, I never use meals - I just make a "recipe" instead with the same stuff. That way it adds only one line to my diary like "Regular ham/broccoli/chs/soda lunch".

    No clue about sharing with someone else though!

    If I make it a recipe how do I convert that into a meal to be copied and reused? Sorry for the newbie question...

  • aylajane
    aylajane Posts: 979 Member
    edited January 2015
    You dont - you add it like any other food to your diary - it just only shows as a single line. Recipes are supposed to be for things like cake or soup with lots of ingredients, where you split it into how many servings it is (i.e. a cake might have ten ingredients and make 8 servings). Then when you eat a piece of the cake, you just pick it from your recipes and add it - it only adds "my cake" instead of all ten ingredients with 1/8 quantity.

    I use it in place of the "meals" feature at the top (not one of the time divisions on the left). So if I normally have a ham sandwich, broccoli and cheese and a soda for lunch - I create a recipe with those as the "ingredients" and tell it that it makes 1 "serving". Then every day, I add one serving of "my usual lunch" to my diary. Instead of having 6 lines with all the pieces of my meal, it is just one entry.

    I dont know if it would copy to another person after that... but it keeps my diary pretty uncluttered and easier to see what I am eating. I eat a lot of PBJ type stuff and got tired of seeing 4 or 5 entries just to describe my PBJ and milk... so I made it a recipe and now it just says "PBJ and milk" in a single entry in my diary for lunch.

    Again, though I am talking about replacing the "Meals" option at the TOP of the screen (next to "Recipes") - not the individual meal time slots on the left (breakfast, lunch, etc).
  • 3laine75
    3laine75 Posts: 3,069 Member
    edited January 2015
    I didn't know you could do that :open_mouth:

    I f you copy breakfast and there's something in there that you don't have - delete it. Or, for example, if you have 2 eggs but the missus only had one, just adjust it accordingly for what you had. This is what I do with meals I have saved - sometimes I'll want pork mince instead of beef, just delete and add what you had.

    I think you're overthinking the number of meals thing, just log what you have, doesn't matter where.

    Oh, and you can't get on the community from the app yet, just need to flip back and forth with safari :(
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