Salad Bar At Lunch

Enter each ingredient separately.

Or...if you find yourself eating pretty much the same things and quantities of each thing every day, enter a recipe and enter all the fixings as separate ingredients in the recipe. Call it "My Salad Bar Lunch" or something like that, so you can just log one item on future days.

I do what juggernaut1974 does... I make my own salads from time to time and salad bars, too... I know what I like on my salads, ( creature of habit ) so I created my own entry that "makes" my salad... It's time consuming at first, but once it's done, it's as easy as one touch!!
Good luck

I very carefully weighed everything out for a salad at home once and all the lettuce and veggies came to 60 calories for a big plate full. And playing around with more or less of different veggies didn't really seem to affect it, so now I just log my salad as that. Then I list separately the higher cal stuff - hard boiled egg, cheese, meat, avocado, dressing. Nuts, sunflower seeds, dried fruit would qualify as well, but I don't tend to put them in my salad. Makes it easier and still fairly accurate.

juggernaut1974 wrote: »

Enter each ingredient separately.

Or...if you find yourself eating pretty much the same things and quantities of each thing every day, enter a recipe and enter all the fixings as separate ingredients in the recipe. Call it "My Salad Bar Lunch" or something like that, so you can just log one item on future days.

Or you could use the "my meals" function, which works well even if you don't have the same amounts and you sometimes have, e.g., kidney beans and cheese as your salad bar protein and other days you go for tuna and hard-boiled egg. Day 1: enter the ingredients from that day's salad, click "remember meal" and name it "Salad Bar Lunch options." Day 2: Log "Salad Bar Lunch options" for lunch. If you added anything to today's salad that wasn't already part of the remembered meal, log those ingredients now. Click "remember meal" and then "save as existing meal" (that might not be the exact language, but it's something like that). Select "Salad Bar Lunch options" to save the new version under that name. Go back to your lunch log and delete anything that was part of the meal from yesterday's lunch that you didn't have today. Adjust any amounts of food that might be different (I mostly use eyeballed volume amounts for veggies, and experience from lots of weighing and logging at home to estimate weights on higher calorie ingredients).

It probably sounds more complicated than it is, but it's so much easier to delete things that are part of the saved meal that you didn't have this time than it is to keep looking up ingredients in the database and logging them.

I have "my meals" of this type (with lots of ingredients that I don't always use every time I have that particular meal) for meals I make at home, such as stir-fries, oatmeal (includes all my favorite add-ins), and protein smoothies (includes all my favorite fruits, as well as different protein and liquid options, and things like flax, chia, PB2, cocoa powder that I sometimes add), as well as for meals from food trucks & carts that I go to and for fast food places that follow the "Chipotle model" -- i.e., places where you select from a choice of bases, different proteins, different veggies and toppings. So I might have an entry called "Chipotle meal options" that includes brown rice, black beans, sofritos (tofu), carnitas, barbacoa, sour cream, corn salsa, tomatillo salsa, and guacamole, because those are things I'm likely to have, and doesn't include steak, chicken, or pinto beans, because I don't ever have those. I can log that meal, delete whichever proteins I didn't have and possibly the guac, because I don't always have that, adjust any portions if I noticed the server was a little over generous with something, and I'm done. It's very fast that way, and to me it seems a lot easier than having a lot of customized meals or recipes for each different combination of ingredients I might choose (e.g., pumpkin oatmeal, apple oatmeal, banana oatmeal, etc.; or peanut butter-banana-blueberry smoothie, cinnamon-pumpkin-cranberry smoothie, cocoa-avocado-cherry smoothie, etc.)