At Goal & Successfully Maintaining. So Why Am I Doing This All Over Again?

Are you using the meals / recipes function?

You’ll find it in the main menu.

With the recipes function, you can import recipes from many other websites by pasting in the url.



Later you can find the recipe and import it into your daily food diary. It will show in your diary as one lump item, ie “Lasagna 626 calories”. It will also give you lump sums on the macros included in the ingredients.

Personally, though, I prefer the “meals” function to save a recipe.

Yes, you have to take a few moments to individually find and enter each ingredient. But you have to futz around with recipes, too, to find the appropriate items prior to saving.

When you save a meal to your daily diary, it will save each ingredient individually.

This makes it easy to change a single ingredient. For example you substituted chicken or mushrooms for ground beef in your lasagna that day. Or maybe there was a sale on the store brand, which has slightly different calories than what you usually use. You can copy your meal and save it with the revised ingredients.

Saving as a meal also lets you track your macros in more detail, by individual ingredient.

You also have the ability to copy a meal as many times as you want, and easily adjust the ingredients, if you’re still experiment or improving on it, while still saving a copy of the original meal.

I find it helps to include the date in my title, because the last version is typically the most accurate and up to date.

Here I’ve saved the original entry as “lasagna sauce only”, because this sauce also happens to make a terrific spaghetti sauce.

Then I copied the sauce entry and added the rest of the lasagna ingredients for a full pan of lasagna. (After deducting 25% of the sauce because I’ve set that aside for spaghetti for anther couple meals. )




It’s also easier for a spouse or friend to find and transport a meal from your diary into their own, and know exactly what they’re eating. If they copy a recipe all they’re getting is that lump sum total.

I generally save a meal as 1 serving and then adjust the quantity within my diary function before I add it to my diary.

For example, this pan of lasagna Is a total of 7,538 calories. It will make 12 servings.

When I find the meal in my diary, I’ll change the serving size to .083 (or 1/12th) before saving it to my diary. This will add 626 to my daily food diary for dinner.

Please note. I do use the iOS app. The Android should be similar. I rarely use the web version, so YMMV. The best way to figure these out is simply to sit down and play with them. But if you’ve got a pretty consistent rotation of meals, using either function will make your life- and logging- much easier!

EliseTK1 wrote: »

@springlering62

Thank you SO MUCH for this fabulous thread. I’ve been reading through it for about a week any time I have a few extra minutes. Thanks to you I now have a Ninja Creami in my Amazon cart.

There are so many things I wanted to respond to, but I’ll just say this one- thank you very much for your shoutout to Registered Dietitians. I am an RD specializing in kidney failure/dialysis with a great love of general health/fitness and a lifelong personal struggle with my own weight. Most people have no idea what an RD is, much less what we went through to get those credentials. It means so much to me (to all of us, really) to be recognized.

I recommend MFP to my tech-savvy patients when it’s indicated. I’ve had some start using it and lose enough weight to qualify for a kidney transplant. That is exceptionally rewarding.

Well, thanks for all you do!

My visits with my RD were pivotal in my journey. She was the first person to tell me specific foods aren’t bad. It’s our perception and overindulgence that’s bad, something I’ve also heard over and over here.

And her suggestions really made me re-think what I was eating, and how I was eating it.

I sincerely hope you have many many more satisfying successes, for your patients and yourself!