BUG in RECIPES

Lodz49
Lodz49 Posts: 8 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Own Recipes, manually entered, should give calories and other nutritional values per 100g, or, per serving. It is not always possible to record the exact number of servings e.g. home-baked bread, but the list of ingredients should be sufficient for that purpose. There should be a facility to enter number of servings, or, the quantity (100g) of made-up recipe. I, for one, weigh my food before entering into diary and know that there are different calorific values between raw and cooked food. I have written to MFP support and received a disappointing reply. Please, software engineers at MFP, put your thinking hats on!

Replies

  • Elphaba1313
    Elphaba1313 Posts: 203 Member
    How could it calulate100g? How would the recipe builder know how much everything you've entered weighs? Especially since it changes so much during cooking. That's not a bug, it's just the way it is. But if you put your own thinking hat on, there is a simple solution.

    You can just make it "one serving" in the recipe builder. then, when it's all cooked, weigh the lot. If it weighs (for example) 1 kg, and you eat 100g, then you say you ate .1 of serving. Easy peasy!
  • Lodz49
    Lodz49 Posts: 8 Member
    Bug or no bug - that is debatable bearing in mind the mission and reputation of My Fitness Pal.
    Your developers should look at these two websites where the right tool was devised: https://www.nutritics.com/p/userguide&c=69 and http://www.alacalc.co.uk/dashboard?locale=en.
    I do not think your solution is "easy peasy" and accurate.
  • Alatariel75
    Alatariel75 Posts: 18,242 Member
    Make recipe, weigh recipe, put weight of recipe in grams as number of serves (ie - recipe total 1450 grams, enter 1450 serves).

    Then when you weigh yourself out a portion, put the weight in grams of your serve as number of servings (ie - serving size 250g, enter 250 servings)

    If you want to suggest improvements to the recipe builder, there is a sticky thread in the Feedback section. I warn you though, it was started 2 years ago and they have implemented exactly zero of the suggestions (including requests to restore functionality they removed more than 2 years ago). If you think the response you get from support was disappointing, you'll be dismayed by the feedback thread.
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    That would not be a good idea at least for a couple of reasons:
    1. You would be taking in way more calories than you expect due to moisture loss during cooking, which would impact your weight loss negatively. Food needs to be weighed after cooking for the calculations to be accurate
    2. MFP's database is used-entered, which would create extreme calculation errors when someone enters something in servings, pieces, or cups. While official entries may have a value in both cups and grams, there is no way of knowing what a user entered cupful of food is supposed to weight.

    What I do personally is that I weigh my ingredients, then weigh my resulting dish after cooking, and divide for servings by 100 grams. Say I have 1 kg of cooked food, I divide it by 100 grams, which results in 10 servings 100 grams each. It's may be a bit convoluted, but it is what it is if you actually want to track your calories accurately.

    Now a workaround suggestion would be for MFP to provide a way to enter the total weight of an entire recipe instead of just servings. That would a convenient compromise that would not affect accuracy or be affected by the user-entered nature of the database.
  • Lodz49
    Lodz49 Posts: 8 Member
    Thank you, amusedmonkey, I will try your suggestion. I hope more members will contribute to this thread and convince the developers to re-think the Recipe Builder. I think a development in this area would make a huge difference, and I am sure the solution is not beyond the wit of a respectable software developer. I do hope that Under Armour Inc, which claims to be "The world's largest fitness community" will show goodwill and imagination by responding to this request. I am copying this thread to Under Armour Inc.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 9,284 Member
    As Alatariel said the owners of MFP are really poor at following through with suggestions - many many people for example, wanted the tickers back in posts but this has never been implemented

    However, as has been said, it is very easy to weigh the total amount of recipes like soups, casseroles, salads etc - enter the ingredients by weight as you make the recipe - then weigh total of finished product - I then divide it into 100g servings -so if, for example, the total weighed 2,300 g ( I round it off to nearest 100g for easy maths) I would call it 23 serves of 100g each.

    Then when you dish out your portion, if you weigh it and it weighs, for example, 450g, log it as 4.5 servings

    another handy tip - if it is a container you use regularly, weigh it empty and record amount on bottom in permanant texta. Then you can weigh total of crockpot or whatever with finished casserole in it and just subtract pot weight from total of pot and food to get weight of food.

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