Able to create a custom meal and indicate number of servings

[mrshrdng1016]

I would really like to be able to build a recipie and then indicate how many servings it makes and how much I ate and see nutritional break down by servings too.  I think it would way easier than trying to enter all ingredients then when its time to eat the leftovers I can just add the recipie serving.

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject and updated label

[hollisterjf]

Try connecting your Fitbit account with the MyFitness Pal app (it;s free).  The MFP app has much better food recording capabilities and it syncs all of the data into your Fitbit account.

[kathryn_dc]

I would love to see communication between Fitbit and myfitnesspal. I have been using myfitnesspal for years, in essence creating a custom database of favorite food and serving sizes, as well as recipes that I have input.

I will not update two different systems; my ideal would be that information from myfitnesspal be pushed to Fitbit.

Thanks! 🙂

[adolson]

MyFitnessPal and Fitbit DO communicate... Might wanna look into that, kathryn_dc...

I'd rather do all of my tracking here and drop MFP, quite honestly, so I add my vote to this. The MFP database has way too much garbage in it, but without recipes here, I'm stuck with it. 90% of what I eat is home-cooked multi-ingredient meals.

[smith37]

What I do is create it in another application and then I find something they have that is comparable calorie wise.

[schnika]

I only tried to use the FitBit tracking once months ago, and found that I preferred the food tracking database at MyFitnessPal, which integrates very nicely with FitBit.  MyFitnessPal has the recipe builder feature you mention.

[jchacko]

I usually use MyFitnessPal for this which then sync the calorie intake back to Fitbit.

Defeats the purpose if you would like one single app though!

[KJax]

Users can "Create a meal" from within the Food Log, where we list out the ingredients. My suggestion is to add a one-liner like "Yields: [#] servings" where users can enter how many servings the recipe makes.

It'd be a lot easier on users if we could enter the whole recipe and then Fitbit takes care of calculating the stats when we log eating 1 serving of the overall meal.

Alternatively, I've seen many users suggest adding this as a separate "Create a recipe" option.

It would also be useful if we could then share that created meal/recipe with a fellow Fitbit user, especially if (for example) you're cooking for a family. Only one person would need to create the meal/recipe and everyone could log it.

[AllanL]

Yes i was just looking for a way to share my Foods/Recipes as i have become an avid user and it has helped my lose weight and bulk up in the gym (being able to accurately track protein and fats) and now my wife is interested (since i have made great progress) she is getting her fitbit today and asked if she could share my foods as we live in Canada and many of the items in the Fitbit food section are inaccurate in Canada (different laws or manufacturing processes) so i have entered many custom foods and since we eat meals together it would be nice to export/import or have a shared food section that she could use instead of re-entering all the data again for her.

[craftyk56]

I am new to Fitbit, so possibley I have not been using the food logging properly.  Pleaes Help.

I would like to have the opportunity to enter a recipe and calulate the calories per serving.

I discovered resturant foods are not list as the serving that is servered.  When logging it shows the calories for the items but when entering the item it reverts to an amount that must be edited.  Ie.  Bob Evans roll show the calories count and shows that as a 2oz roll.  Then entering the amount it logs as 1oz.  

Thank you for your help.

[Mb54]

It seems that this would be an easy feature to add, and would be very useful.  Either allow to specify number of servings for a meal, or total weight or volume.  For example, one could enter all the ingredients for baking a loaf of bread, weigh the whole loaf in ounces or grams, e.g., a 24 oz. loaf for the "meal" and then have a 2 oz. slice at dinner.  The software ought to be able to report the nutrition for that fraction of the meal, just like it does for individual foods.

Please add this feature.  I bet your web programmers could do it in a few minutes.

[HolyFriedFish]

There are other websites/free programs that do this, so I imagine it could take a bit of work, but it's obviously doable. I'd honestly love this, even if we have to input nutrition information for each individual ingredient (which would be a pain for us, but would make programming easier on them).

[gaya]

This would be very helpful.  I just used the meal option to enter all of the ingredients that I put in a casserole.  Now I want to specify that I ate 1/8 of the casserole for lunch, but that option doesn't exist.  I know that I can specify 1/8 of each of the ingredients listed, but this isn't so user friendly on a recipe that has 20 ingredients.

[jeeves112]

I would like the option of entering and saving a recipe and having the ability to divide it into portions.  This is a feature I loved when using Livestrong's Myplate app.

Thanks! 

[MKB1]

I make almost everything I eat how about being able to add recipes indgrediaents and serving sizes to estimate clories

[gfbaker]

I'd like to see a way I can create a meal that I am cooking for my family, then say what portion of that meal I am eating. It is really difficult to try to parcel down the ingredients to 1/4 or 1/5 of what I am cooking. I also agree that more plain ingredients should be in the inventory instead of lots of processed foods.

[Shawn77]

I am a father of 2 and cook meals for myself, wife and 2 kids daily. I think it would be really great if I could enter all ingredients for a meal to the meals section and then be able to select the portion eaten. Currently If I enter a meal with everything used as a meal, I can only enter the whole thing no portion options. I know myfitnesspal does this but I don't want to use another app, I enter all my own nutrition info for foods eaten here on fitbit because I often found myfitnesspal to be wrong or way too many versions of a food. Keeping all my info about my foods I eat here makes the most sence for me.

[PatriciaMc]

Yes, this would be better than having to link to a thirdparty which already has this feature, like my fitness pal

[laurenletha]

I agree with everyone that the Enter a Meal option should also provide serving sizes. I just made a large batch of lentil soup for the family, but I want to log that I only ate 1 cup of it for my meal. It would be so convienient to log the exact large amounts (2 lbs lentils, 3 celery stalks, 10 baby carrots, etc.) then be able to log that I only ate 1 cup of it; otherwise, I have to eyeball it and estimate I might have had 1/4 cup lentils, 1/8 a celery stalk and a baby carrot in my cup 🙂

[Soon2BThin]

The "custom" option allows me to enter ONE custom food item, but won't let me combine items from the database for a custom "recipe" of blended items. I think most of us are creatures of habit, eating many of the same things. So when I make my "Special Smoothie" recipe EVERY MORNING, I hate to select the Strawberries from the database, then find flax seed, then protein powder, etc. I could make a custom "Special Smoothie" food item, but I'd need to search all the ingredients and add them up myself before creating the recipe. It should allow for combining. So I could then make a "Jellied Toast" entry that includes BOTH bread and jelly, etc.

I also do not see an easy way to "just log calories" for a food item I can't locate. I found a 100 calorie yogurt, so I just use that item, but then when I use it the next time, it remembers "12 servings".... Yikes!

[lovegoldens]

I love my fitbit but I wish they would redesign the bracelet clasp. It is incredibly difficult to fasten until it is broken in.I am wearing the larger size - which is too big - but after multiple attempts, I still cannot get the smaller one to fasten. This is just crazy. Fix this, please!!!!

[gone-plaid]

I would LOVE for fitbit food/meal logging to allow for serving sizes when entering meals. I cook things at home and used myFitnessPal to do this before and it was easy, but FitBit doesnt' allow for me to indentify how many serving sizes there are for a meal.

so if i have to log that meal for dinner, i'm over by 3000 calories which is innacurate. I knew i'd have to strt over (and was ok with that) when moving my meal database from MFP to fit bit, but **ahem**.... SERVING SIZE!

[TandemWalker]

Instead of creating a food item for your smoothie, create a custom meal for your smoothie and let fitbit.com add all the ingredients. That's what I did with all the routine, daily stuff - coffee (cream, sugar), smoothies, greek yogurt with nuts and raisins, tuna sandwich ...)

[Namf78]

YES!  YES!  YES!

  I've just spent about an hour and a half loading all the ingredients in for a meal I've made and Fitbit thinks I ate the whole lot at once!  

Being able to state what portion size I ate of this makes so much sense, and I'm pretty surprised that this feature doesn't exist already!!

Absolutely brilliant suggestion gfbaker!

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@gfbaker wrote:

I'd like to see a way I can create a meal that I am cooking for my family, then say what portion of that meal I am eating. It is really difficult to try to parcel down the ingredients to 1/4 or 1/5 of what I am cooking. I also agree that more plain ingredients should be in the inventory instead of lots of processed foods.

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[ScottHiser]

As a user I would like the ability to create new meals by bundling existing foods.  Like a lot of people, I cook my own food and almost all of the ingredients are listed in their raw form in the food database.  Since I cook most of my food this makes it cumbersome and a poor end user experience to have to create new foods, expecially if entering the nutrituional values.

This feature could be accomplished by creating a relational values table in the food database that links to the parent food ID with the quantity and UofM for that ingredient.  Then a foreach loop could use the exisitng method to get the total calories for that meal.

Thanks,

Scott

Moderator Edit: Added Labels

[md-k]

For a meal it is straight forward to calculate fractions of the whole meal using existing methods for private foods and not use the extremely limited Fitbit Meal feature.   

Circumvent the programming deficiency by creating a single food composed of the totals of all the ingredients assembled on some future date in the future and then specify the total weight / volume.  I use Anytime a few days ahead, save as a favorite , and then it is easy to create servings that are fractions of the whole recipe.