Using My Fitness Pal

cbmonstra

Hello

I'm sorry if this has been asked before.

I need to use My Fitness Pal to start tracking what I'm eating but I am having a little trouble figuring it out.

I cook just about all my meals from scratch. For example, lunch every day is homemade soup in the slow cooker. My dinner might be a lasagne or beef chilli, totally from scratch. I never use shop bought sauces or meals.

How do you track meals like this in MFP? Several times I've downloaded the app to use it, and I end up uninstalling it when I find I can't really track the food I'm eating.

Any advice please? Thanks.

The Raptor

You can create your own recipes in it. Add all the ingredients and you enter the number of servings of what you made.

It helps if you write down everything before you start because it's not always easy to tell how many servings you're making and fill it in after.

dastardly00

As The Raptor said, you can add your own recipes to MFP. This can be quite tedious and time consuming when you are starting out, especially since you cook a lot of meals from scratch.

It is worthwhile to do though if you want to track your calories or to develop your understanding of nutrition. In particular it's great for learning about serving/portion control, as it can be quite hard to judge how much to eat when it's a homemade meal.

I have around 40 recipes created such as bolognese, fajitas, protein bars, porridge bread, soup, muesli, and desserts ()... all homemade.

Just make sure you enter all your ingredients correctly, they can very often be wrong when you search for them on the MFP database (eg. kcal, fat and protein quantities might be right, but the value for sugar is zero and you know the food has sugar in it).

basill

http://myfitnesspal.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1731403-how-does-the-recipe-importer-in-the-ios-and-android-apps-work-

cbmonstra

Just wanted to say, thanks everyone for your advice.

I downloaded the app again and have been using it since Monday.

It's had some updates since the last time I used it, so I'm finding it a bit better for adding recipes.

I've also synced my S Health app which I use to track my exercise, so that's been great.

Hoping that I just get used to the weighing and calculating the more I use it. I've always been a eyeballer when it comes to ingredients.

Been keeping it pretty simple so far, but there may be some more complicated recipes to be added this weekend

Thanks for the link above basill, that's very helpful.

Macy0161

dastardly00 wrote: »

As The Raptor said, you can add your own recipes to MFP. This can be quite tedious and time consuming when you are starting out, especially since you cook a lot of meals from scratch.

But once done, you can edit them, if you repeat recipes/ do variations. It does save a lot of time down the line.