An easy way to create a custom food with multiple ingredients?
 

I'm currently putting together a big pot of Tuscan bean soup with lots of different ingredients. I figure the easiest way to manage this will be to calculated everything that goes into the pot to create one customer food, and then work out my portion of that. Is there any way of doing this? How does everyone else manage shared recipes with multiple ingredients?

I have tons of recipes loaded to my custom foods. After cooking a dish, I enter all the recipe total ingredients on a blank page of my food log. Then (and here's the tricky part for soup) I determine how many servings it made. Well, we all know a serving "size" is a relative thing. I personally call a serving of soup for an adult 1.5 cups, but most people say 1 cup. Once I have determined how many servings I consider the recipe makes, I divide the figures Fitday gave me by the number of servings to get the nutritional info for ONE serving. And don't forget to divide the fiber by # servings as well! I jot my serving numbers on a piece of paper. Then I load up a CUSTOM FOOD, being sure to include serving size (1.5 c) as part of the food/recipe name (since Fitday shows 1 serving only).

For example: Soup, Tuscan Bean, 1.5 c

And then I enter all the numbers and click the SAVE button.

That's all there is to it!

I have a recipe blog and have to go through this for every single recipe I post there. Check it out!

Buttoni's Blog

Can you explain exactly how you do the blank page on the food log. I am new to this and almost always make my own foods so this is a big issue. Is there a way to write in recipes and have the site compile the nutritional stats for the whole thing, or do you have to create a custom food for each individual component? If so, it is too much trouble when there is 20 ingredients.

Folks,

I came up with a little Excel spread sheet that will automatically calculate the amount per serving of your recipes. Just enter the number of servings the recipe makes (lower left green box), enter your ingredients across the top in row one, then enter the nutritional values of each ingredient down each column. The spreadsheet automatically adds everything up and divides it by the number of servings you entered. You can then go and enter this info to create a custom food. If you save the spreadsheet under a different name, you can have it on hand if you decide to modify the recipe in the future.

Here's the Link. When prompted, save it somewhere you'll remember where it is.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/11...0Worksheet.xls

Good luck

Vince:D

I'm using an iPad and don't have the capacity to use spread sheets (but I'll try to get the file suggested above) or open a page since I don't have the PC version. What I do is to go to the day ahead, load up the ingredients, copy the calories, fats, etc. from the pie chart, then open the nutrition page above the pie chart. I copy all the values from that page, then load my new 'custom' food onto its own page. Finally, I go back to the day ahead log and clean it out. This takes a fair amount of time, and I only do it for meals I'm going to have multiple times, but it gets the job done.
I've seen this question come up before - think that
FIT DAY NEEDS TO HELP US OUT HERE!

when I do something like that I calculate everything that goins into it, then after cooked I weight it to get a total weight. Then from there I divide that out to figure out have many grams I can have for my desired calories for that meal. Then I just seperate it out into containers, and freeze a few.

I like that. I'll have to save it and give it a shot. Thanks.

I use this website:

Link removed

Wow! I like your link.

Thanks!

I love this website: Sparkpeople (see below link removed)


It has a recipe calculator so I can take all my recipes, enter the ingredients, and it will tell me the calories and nutritional info. Then I just add a custom food to my fitday. Much easier then trying to use fitday alone.

I use this site for recipes: Link removed
It actually is very similar to fitday other than you can't save a journal - it just keeps one day.

jennij64
 

I have just started to use FitDay. I am having a problem with Custom Foods.
I have created a custom list but when I send the food to Food Log all of the properties of that food show up a '0'.
What am I doing wrong. I so need to work out my gluten/yeast free recipes and find their calorie value per portion but cannot get the program to say how many calories etc. are in each recipe. Help! Help! Help! Pleaseeee.

Jennij64:confused:

I use caloriecount.

For the zuppa toscana traditional way i have found this values in Italy.
here is the recipe for one person.

1 lb Mango Smoked Chicken Sausage
1 1/2 lb Medium Red Potatoes
1 medium Onion, Sweet
2 Garlic Clove
30 g Crumbled Real Bacon Bits
8 cups Water
4 tsp Chicken Base
1 cup Half-n-half
2 cups Organic Green Kale

Cut Sausage into slices. (or small pieces)

In a stock pot,brown sausage, onion, potatoes(sliced in 1/4" slices),and garlic until onion is transparent.

Add water and Chicken Base. Stir to dissolve the chicken base. Add bacon bits and kale.

Cook on medium heat until potatoes are done.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Simmer for another 10 minutes.

Turn heat to low , add the half and half.

Heat through and serve

one serving

Amount per Serving
Calories 170 Calories from Fat 149
% Daily Value *
Total Fat 4g 6%
Saturated Fat 2g 10%
Sodium 960mg 40%
Total Carbohydrate 24g 8%
Dietary Fiber 2g 8%
Protein 2g 4%
Vitamin A44%
Vitamin C43%
Calcium4
Iron7%
Est. Percent of Calories from:
Fat 21.2% Carbs 56.5%
Protein 4.7%

Setting up a custom food with multiple ingredients
 

Enter all the ingredients on a day with no other entries on the food diary. Print out the results which will give you a reminder of the individual components or take a note of the calories protein fat carbs etc.
Then enter as new custom food, give it a name plus whole recipe or single serve. I use whole recipe and then when entering in food log at a later date I give it a fraction depending on what serving size I end up using. Eg 1 of 5 is entered as .2 serving :)

How lame is this.....???? Obviously FitDay sucks if you have to jump through these kind of hoops to make a recipe.....

Custom Recipies
 

I use Caloriecount on foods new recipe, type in your ingredients and then it gives you a nutrition label for that recipe. Save and go back later to my recipes on calorie count or save as a custom food in Fitday. They really need to make it easier to add brand name foods and custom recipes.

I create a custom food for the recipe and drag all the ingredients to it and then use my computer's calculator (or just do the math in my head) to go down the list and divide into however many servings and it calculates everything. I check the cals in Fitday and round them then save. When naming my recipe I note how many servings the recipe makes so we cooking a full recipe another time I know how much of an ingredient to use. I don't have any need to go to another website to calculate anything when I have Fitday PC.

I use Links removed to get approximate values for a lot of restaurant/prepackaged foods that aren't in FitDay's database. I also use the back of the box for this. For calculating recipes, I use and. Another site I've been loving lately is food.com which is a user created database of THOUSANDS of recipes. You can search by ingredients, main dish or side, time and difficulty to make-it's awesome. Some recipes have nutrition info, some don't but it's pretty easy to plug it into one of the recipe calculators above. I used to do the math by hand when I started out too, the online tools save a lot of time. Open fitday in one window, and a calculator in the other, shrink the windows to make them both appear side by side, and it's sooo much easier. It also gets easier as you go, because you can browse your previously entered foods as well as your custom ones. Make sure you put some sort of unit on your recipe names(whole recipe, 1 cup, something like that) so you remember later what the portion size is, because FitDay's custom foods always come up as "one serving" in the measurement slot.

[QUOTE=Lizzycritter;25417 Open fitday in one window, and a calculator in the other, shrink the windows to make them both appear side by side, and it's sooo much easier. .[/QUOTE]

Great time saver!

What a pain! Would it be to much effort to add a button to the entry page that says - "create custom food from today's entries". Come on! Do it!

Hmmm, I have an older version of fitday that allows you to add ingredients to create a custom recipe. The custom food section has a seperate tab for that. Haven't checked out this site in a long time, but it has changed some and doesn't look as user friendly as it used to be.

A way to avoid having to use a calculator as much is after adding all the ingredients of your recipe to a blank day in the future open fitday again in another window and tile them side by side.

In the new window select "Create A Custom Food" and name it but do not put in any of the info, then select "create this food".

Then change the "Amount:" to the total, either servings or weight, whichever you prefer to use (unfortunately you can't use both unless it's as separate entries), and click "recalculate".

After the page has loaded click "Edit This Food" and enter the info from the Calories and Nutrition tabs of your recipe from the other window.

Once you click "Save This Food" you're done.

All said, I also think a "save as recipe" option is warranted.

Re: An easy way to create a custom food with multiple ingredients?
 

I discovered it quite fascinating to study I'd personally enjoy to check out you compose extra on this topic.

OK, I won't provide the link, but if you google 'calculate nutrition,' there will be several websites that allow you to do this. I use one that has 'self' in the name. I like it, but there are several websites, as I said.

I also have an old PC version of FitDay and I can create a custom recipe by adding ingredients -- and I'm pretty sure I used to be able to do the same on the old web version. FitDay: please bring back that capability!

I don't know if they used to have this capability for free, as you say, but the capability still exists with Premium. You can sync your recipes that you've built in FD PC to your FD Premium account; your recipes will then transfer to your online account.