How to do a Recipe on FitDay.
 

Homemade vegetable soup is great on cold days and full of nutrition. Trying different recipe calculators on a variety of websites did not get me the results I wanted. So I improvised with FitDay.

How to make a recipe:
1) Click ahead a couple of days in your Food Log
2) Enter all the ingredients (including spices) for your (recipe) soup; using correct weights and measures.
3) When complete, go to bottom of Food log and click on nutrition.
4) Now you have the recipe and nutrition facts ready to be printed off!
5) Go to upper right side of page and click on 'printer friendly' and print off list.
6) Now go into your Custom Foods and create a new food item.

How simple was that! Make sure you measure after cooking to get the amount of product; to make it easier for you to divide you custom food by.

I made slow cooker soup with russet, red and sweet potato in a low sodium (organic -on sale) chicken broth (1Litre/4c) and added 1L water. It made an entire slow cooker of soup. I estimated my batch of soup was 10c; so now, when I record it on my Food Log - and I have 1c of soup - I enter the amount = .1 (I actually had 3c so I put in .3 )

Before you get all up in the air about lack of protein and high carb - I had already cooked my LGT (lean ground turkey) the other day and I added 100 grams to my soup! I cooked LGBeef for the DH, so he could add his own meat to his dish.

I hope this helps, Carren

You gotta be KIDDING me...! What if I make a multiple-serving recipe... say it makes 12 servings. How do I enter just ONE serving...?

This is totally lame...

If you use the Spark People recipe calculator, it gives you the nutrition info per serving, and that's what you enter as a custom food on FitDay.

If you have already entered the recipe, enter 0.085 in your food log for one serving. If you are entering a recipe that makes 12 servings, enter 12 servings before you enter the ingredients - then enter 1 serving in the food log for each serving.

Bill

How to make custom meals?
 

I've made many custom foods, and that function is great. But I don't understand how I can group some of these custom foods into one meal or recipe? Is it even possible? :confused:

Custom meals?
 

When I was referred to fitday, I was told I had to "make the meal" at allrecipes and then import it into fitday... I spent quite a bit of time at allrecipes and never figured out where on that site to do that! If I do, I'll let you know.

Brian

Hi guys,
There's a bunch of different recipe calculator sites. Just Google something like "recipe nutrition calculator" and take your pick. I do this all the time and don't have a preferred site because they're all pretty much the same. I would say to double check your ingredients/measurements/yields before you hit "calculate" -- some recipe calculators do not let you edit after you've finalized everything. It sucks to re-enter a complicated recipe, trust me, I know! :o


On a side note:
The only thing I've had problems with when creating my own recipes using online calculators is the Vitamin/Mineral counts -- not that they're inaccurate, but often the data will be spit out in IU, g or mg (not % daily value as FitDay uses). In order to deal with that you'll have to find the recommended daily values for each (I use the Mayo Clinic website) and divide the amount of whatever nutrient in the recipe by the recommended intake.

For example, my recipe for Mom's Rhubarb Muffins has 1.82 milligrams of iron per muffin. The recommended daily intake of iron is 18mg. 1.82/18 = .10111 Move the decimal over two places to get the percentage and you get 10% to add to your FitDay data.

Some online recipe calculators DO spit the numbers out in % instead of IU, mg or g. But in case you find one that you like otherwise, this should help ya get everything into FitDay as accurately as possible.

I recently purchased Fitday PC and it looks like it has a recipe calculator included in it, I haven't had an opportunity to try it yet, has anybody here used it?

advice on logging home cooked food
 

Hi!

I am new to fitday. Can somebody give me advice how best to log meals that I cooked myself?

Do I have to weigh and add each ingredient separately each time I cook or can I create a custom "dish" that consists of several ingredients.

For example is there a way to build the recipe/calorie count for a dish like "potato and leek soup" or do I have to enter the calorie value for potato, leek, soup stock etc. separately to my daily food log each time I cook this dish?

I saw that I can create customs foods - but this doesn't work for recipes since I don't know how much calories my recipe has.

Hm, hope that explanation wasn't too confusing. Thanks for your help.

Glad to be part of the group, :)
Kyra

What I do is go to a blank Food Log (one or two days in advance) and then add the ingredients to the the log. For example, I made Spaghetti a few nights ago, so before cooking I weighed out all of the ingredients I was using, added them to a blank log and VOILA! all the calculating had been done for me! This will tell you what is in the entire cooked meal. What I did then was divide the total numbers by how many servings are in the meal. I generally "eyeball" how many servings are in my meals, I usually round down though. I'd rather risk being under my calories than over. What I mean by that is, if I think I can stretch my pot of spaghetti to 8 decent sized servings, I'll usually divide it by 6. It's just my method.

After you create your meal in a blank log, you'll then have to create a custom food for that meal. (I do this by opening a new page and minimizing both pages so they fit side by side on my screen. It saves a lot of flipping back and forth) You can use the total numbers, divided by servings or you can weigh the cooked meal and use the total nutrition as your Custom Food.

If you choose to weigh the whole meal, be sure to type just the name in and save. After you save just the name of the meal, change "1 serving" to how much your food weighed and the unit of weight you used (grams, kilograms, ounces, etc), hit recalculate (all the nutrition should still say 0) and then hit "Edit Food". Add all of your nutritional information for the whole meal, and then save your edited food. When you eat that meal, weigh your individual portion, and log how much it weighed to your food log.

It seems like a lot of work, but in the long run it'll be easier to have some Customs that are full meals. The next time you cook that meal, it's already there. I'm one of those picky eaters that makes the same meals over and over, because I know that I already like it.

Hope this helps!!

Thanks a lot Tori for the detailed explanation and Vito for the link.

Kyra and Tori--thanks for this thread! I was actually just searching online for a good recipe builder earlier today, but I used Tori's suggestion (thanks for the clear explanation) and it worked wonderfully.

I'm glad I could be of assistance!

Creating Custom Foods and Custom Meals has been key for me. I tend to use store brands when I can, simply for monetary reasons, and have found that they usually differ from national brands. Because of this, I only log foods that I've created in my Customs. The great thing about using the same brands time after time is, when you need to use it for a recipe, BAM it's already in your Custom Foods.

It takes some playing with, but once you get the hang of it, it only takes a matter of seconds to create your foods.

One thing that I do when I'm away from home is take a picture of the Nutritional label with my phone. That way I can call them up on demand when I want to create my foods. Saves the headache of trying to remember what was what, or looking them up online.

Don't forget that the FitDay PC software has a nice recipe builder built in, and will sync with FitDay On-line if you have the Premium service. I use it quite often.

Regards,
Michael

Hello. I record my food intake in a notebook,This method worked for me before I had a computer/Iphone etc.My daughter does the same using her Ipod....so whatever works for you.Just have to keep a record that helps you lose wt.Good luck.

recipe builder
 

Thanks for this thread! Im giving Fit Day a trial run and like many things about this format, but I dont care to purchase upgrades yet...
The dificulty of adding a home cooked recipe was gonna be a deal breaker for me. This info was key to keeping me on this site. :)

Great news. Those of us that take the time to understand how things work here, and why certain things are the way they are, have grown to love FitDay. At first glance things may seem overwhelming/confusing and possibly lacking. With minimal effort (like checking out our help file below ;) ) and time it becomes clear just how powerful this fitness tracker is.

And we have a great community too. So stick around. ;)

I am relatively new here, too and wasn't sure if I could stick with all the logging and creating custom foods. My experience is that I got used to it much faster than I thought. Once you build a "basic" food list - it becomes much easier - and the routine of building recipes becomes much! faster with a little practice. Keep at it, it is a great feeling to take control and to track what you can do for yourself to become healthier and to loose weight.

Tori - that's a great suggestion. I had never thought to do this... Thanks!

There's also a recipe builder that I use.

Can't claim to be the one to have found it (that was cjohnson) but I find that it helps. Some foods aren't in the database, however, so if I find that I can't create the recipe accurately there, I do use Tori's method :)

I read this that FitDay Premium had a recipe builder. I bought the FitDay PC many years ago and could not use it with my new (4 years ago) computer. Thinking that FitDay Premium had a recipe builder, I just paid the $50 for it--do I have to pay for FitDay PC again?

Now I'm frustrated...that's a lot of money for the recipe builder to NOT get the recipe builder. I could have kept using the one on SparkPeople.

When using this recipe builder, I enter custom foods for the ones they don't have in the data base. On the 'enter ingredients' screen, there are tabs that you can change. Change to the custom foods tab.

Is there a way to group foods into a meal so they can be logged together?
 

For example, I eat almost the same couple if foods every morning: cereal, milk, orange juice. But I have to add them separately each day. In the weightwatchers food log, you could group multiple foods into a "meal" and add them all at once.

Looking for a reliable recipe calculator
 

Hi Everyone - Happy New Year to you!

I'm searching for a reliable recipe calculator. I do most of my own cooking at home with fresh ingredients, and would like to find a tried and true recipe calculator for knowing exactly what I am eating in my creations. I've been doing it by hand....a royal pain. Anyone have experience with this?

Thanks -

Bonnie