Tracking meals easily (grouping foods)

I hadn't visited this site in about 4 months...

I got sick of searching for each item I ate...especially...say...when I ate a sandwich. I looked for the cheese, the bread, the lettuce, the tomato....

There's got to be a way to group items to make a 'meal'. After all, my diet is pretty simple, with a group of about 20 meals I eat, with some variations.

Any suggestions? Where am I not clicking?

I've been wondering the same thing.

You can always tag your "regular" foods and if you normally eat the same condiments on your sandwich, tag them with the same "name", like ____ sandwich or ____ wrap. Then when you go to log your food, it is all right there in your tags and you click on that to add the whole sandwich (or whatever you have tagged).

Go into the Recipes tab then click on "Analyze my recipe".
You can enter everything you put into the sandwich and you save searching time :)

I tried the analyze my recipe and it did not work.  I put in all the ingredients under "new recipe" for a sandwich  then asked it to analyze it and it came up with 3 calories!

I am sticking it out, but have the same issue. It takes too long to log everything. I am going to try the tag feature. I usually enter everything, if I can not find it exactly or something comprable. The analyze your recipe thing did not work for me either. I know there are sites where you can save "meals" but, you have to pay for those sites.

I have been doing this for a month & use the "add it here" once I've figured out the ingredients & with some variations like "dinner salad with Fat Free Italian, same salad with chicken, turkey etc." Then all I have to do is tag 'em & pull 'em back up & add the item. Basically, once you set 'em up it's pretty easy. Also, my grocery store Publix, has a great web site to find 99% of the stuff I buy. Most of the recipes I work on have the analysis with them, so I just have to adjust the numbers down to a single serving. So far this month I've lost 8lbs.

Original Post by msalazar81:

I hadn't visited this site in about 4 months...

I got sick of searching for each item I ate...especially...say...when I ate a sandwich. I looked for the cheese, the bread, the lettuce, the tomato....

There's got to be a way to group items to make a 'meal'. After all, my diet is pretty simple, with a group of about 20 meals I eat, with some variations.

Any suggestions? Where am I not clicking?

 

I've figured this out :) I have a "day 1", "day 2", etc. on my tagged items. I've got everything to eat for a whole day in each catagory. All you do is go to the tagged items page, find "day 1" and click the little plus sign next to it. (don't click the "day 1" link or it will take you to the entire list and you have to add one at a time). The only problem is that it won't group the items under "breakfast, lunch, dinner" etc. on your daily log. I love doing it that way - if I'm in a hurry I don't have to look it all up individually. Just click a day I have tagged and Boom! I've got a day's worth of good food all laid out for me :)

Kim

I had to retool how I was going to log my foods so they would take forever to find.

What I've done was just tagging them into the major food group that I think of for that food. Ex- Peanut butter  Proteins ,  Bread Grains,  jelly sweets.

If I'm logging more than one meal at a time I'll just click back and I be back into the tagged group I was just in in so If I can just go back and do the reset of my proteins as many times as I need for that group. So forth and so on till I've got all my log items.

It's funny because I mentioned to the CC web guys that I thought the key in the corner of tagged items needed to have the text enlarged and spaced so a person could select items more quickly with having mis-clicks as often. The pretty ignored me but, This current method could use some  tweaking to make it more efficient. 

Hope that helps. 

Oh my gosh Kimmcannally - you just saved me so much time!  It works like a charm!  Thanks!!!!!

Ditto what kimmcannally suggested. I do it for particular meals that I have the same a lot, like for breakfast. Make sure that when you tag the items you put in the serving that you'd usually use. It's better than using the recipe analyser because you still have the individual tagged foods in case you don't use one of the ingredients. You can also use the foods that you've added in yourself, which you can't with the recipe analyser.

I have to go through and put in a few more of my regular lunches and dinners :)