Nutrition Software - Post your tips here

[cheval]

I thought it might be a great idea to post tips and work-arounds in one thread so that we can have a central place to find tips. I'd like to see the thread with lots of tips. Maybe try to make sure there is at least one tip in each post so that this becomes a nice repository. I'm interested in other tips people have.

I'll start off with a couple of my tips in following posts.

April

[cheval]

If you put in the individual ingredients as a recipe, then you end up having all the ingredients added to your mealplan instead of a single line item.

I don't like that, generally, for true recipes, so I create a custom food from a single serving of the recipe.

• Create a recipe by adding the ingredients to a recipe
• Add a single serving to an empty mealplan (no other foods on that day)
• Open a new window of my web browser. (referred to as Browser 2)
• In browser 2, navigate to create a new custom food.
• In browser 1 that has the mealplan with the single serving of the recipe, hover over each of the letter grades for the nutrient values. You'll get the value and the % of recommendation. Use this information to fill in the custom food fields in browser 2.
• Save the custom food in brower 2.
• Now I just add the custom food to my mealplans
• Recipe can be deleted

This process allows me to get and use the nutritional value of a recipe without cluttering my mealplan with individual ingredients.

April

[cheval]

Create a recipe with all the parts of a meal that you eat a lot.

This is a very typical lunch for me.

4 oz baby carrots
1 oz hummus
20 grams natural peanut butter
1 slice 12-grain bread
8 oz natural applesauce

I create a recipe with those items and then when I add the recipe to my mealplan, I have 5 line items that I can tweak if I eat a little more or less of each thing.

As Nancy noted in another thread, recipes can't be added to your favorites. So it's not quite as useful as it could be.

April

[cheval]

I still seem to have some issues logging into the forum and the nutrition software at the same time using FireFox. I found it irritating to log out and clear my cookies all the time, so I came up with the following solution.

I use FireFox for the forums and Internet Explorer for the Nutrition software. It works great and I never have to log out of the forums. I have a password program that automatically fills in my username and password, so in minimal clicks, I'm in the Workout Manager and/or the Nutrition Software without having to log out of the forums.

April

[DeanaMax]

Originally Posted by cheval

I still seem to have some issues logging into the forum and the nutrition software at the same time using FireFox. I found it irritating to log out and clear my cookies all the time, so I came up with the following solution.

I use FireFox for the forums and Internet Explorer for the Nutrition software. It works great and I never have to log out of the forums. I have a password program that automatically fills in my username and password, so in minimal clicks, I'm in the Workout Manager and/or the Nutrition Software without having to log out of the forums.

April

oh clever! great idea. thanks for sharing

[NancyAZ]

Originally Posted by cheval

Create a recipe with all the parts of a meal that you eat a lot.

This is a very typical lunch for me.

4 oz baby carrots
1 oz hummus
20 grams natural peanut butter
1 slice 12-grain bread
8 oz natural applesauce

I create a recipe with those items and then when I add the recipe to my mealplan, I have 5 line items that I can tweak if I eat a little more or less of each thing.

As Nancy noted in another thread, recipes can't be added to your favorites. So it's not quite as useful as it could be.

April

I'm doing this also, creating recipes for a lunch salad I eat quite often, as well as a dinner salad. In this case, I am leaving it as a recipe and won't try to create it as a custom food so that I can add and subtract as I need to for that day. For example, I have snap peas listed in the recipe, but I don't always have them. When I add the recipe to my day, I can delete that particular ingredient.

[dannygirl1]

Has anyone notced the RDA for potassium is too high? It says 4700 mg but from other websites I checked it appears to be more like 3500 mg/day.

[NancyAZ]

Originally Posted by dannygirl1

Has anyone notced the RDA for potassium is too high? It says 4700 mg but from other websites I checked it appears to be more like 3500 mg/day.

I hadn't looked it up yet, but I was really surprised to see that I'm getting Fs in that every day and thought I did well with potassium. If the RDA is wrong, that would sure make a difference.

Another thing I'm finding is that some of the calorie counts are really high. For example, I was surprised to see that Egg Beaters are not listed. They do list something like "Egg Beaters, scrambled eggs from frozen" -- don't quote me on the verbiage. Although I don't use frozen I put that into my meal plan and was shocked to see the calorie count -- way high. I ended up having to create a custom food for liquid Egg Beaters.

I found the same with generic hash browns and a chicken breast, of all things. I couldn't believe you can't just select a plain ole chicken breast -- another custom food! And I'm going by the package NI info, not just my wishful thinking on these things. I think the hash browns in the program came out to 300+ calories, while in actuality they are 70.

[cheval]

Along the lines of what Nancy said... I have a lot of custom foods because I can't find "pure" foods or the counts seem a bit off. But many nutrition labels don't have all the vitamin and extra nutrients. Lots of time potassium is left off a label and only A, Calcium, C, and Iron are given. So I create custom foods based on database foods.

• Search for a food you want. We'll use wheat germ as an example. Click on Wheat Germ, plain.
• Click on the Custom Food tab.
• Then choose the amount you want to base your custom food on. I like to consult the jar of wheat germ for serving size in grams. In this case, it's 13 grams.
• Click Create Custom Food.
• Replace all information in the Food with values from the jar, leave the filled in values that are not present on the jar.

Still not ideal, but a closer match to reality, I think.

I've also found that sodium counts differ a lot from the package. As in the database shows way higher sodium than the package.

April

[NancyAZ]

This is a great tip about tweaking the database entry into the custom food so that you get all of the nutrients listed. That could very well be why I'm so low on the potassium because, as you say, it's often not on the food labels (and funny you should use the wheat germ example, because I have it with meals every day). And the whole sodium thing makes more sense now, too. I really didn't think I was getting that much sodium in my diet -- but maybe I was just clueless!

It's a good thing you're so inventive and are around to help the rest of us. Thanks!