Creating Recipes in My Fitness Pal
Macros are easier when you do single macro source foods. For example, chicken is primarily protein. An apple is primarily carbs. And olive oil is a fat. But eating that way isn't always fun and sometimes making recipes can change things up to keep you on track without breaking the macro bank.
Here's how to create a recipe in My Fitness Pal with calculated macros for each serving size.
Under the Menu, you'll go to Meals, Recipes & Foods
Then you'll have the ability to Create a New Recipe at the bottom of the screen, but you can see that I have a few recipes already entered.
You'll name the recipe your about to create in the Title section and determine the number of servings you'll be making. I'm using chicken soup as an example. If you're following a recipe out of a cookbook, it should give you the number of servings it will make. Don't worry - you can always go back and change this later. This is here to be able to equally split everything up once you enter the ingredients into the recipe, which we'll be doing next.
Next, start adding ingredients as they are listed in the recipe you're following or whatever you're putting tougher. Make sure to measure and weigh everything you're putting into the recipe so that it's accounted for. You can also go back and change these later on if you decide to add more or less of an ingredient.
Once you've added everything to My Fitness Pal, you'll push the arrow in the upper right corner and it will calculate the macros for each serving. Here you can change the servings if needed and you'll notice how the macros get higher with fewer servings or lower with less as you spread it out. Make sure to press Save.
The next screen will give you the ability to add it to your food diary now or you can pull it up later by opening your diary and looking for Recipes in the upper right of the screen under the barcode feature.
For something like this, I like to pre-serve things ahead of time so that I'm as close to what I'm expecting to get when I eat the soup throughout the week. I'll separate the soup into containers as equally as possible to take some of the guesswork out of my prep later on. This makes a world of different for eating a wide variety of food while still sticking to your macros.
Deidre founded Always Growing Nutrition in 2015 with an enthusiasm for health, fitness, and understanding how to optimize the human body. She approaches nutrition from the perspective that each body is unique and this is key to creating nutrition programs that are sustainable for each person to maintain long-term, but also programs that work.
Her passions lie in digestive and hormone health, and she loves working with clients who struggle with balancing these complex systems. She believes that everyone deserves personalized nutrition, to understand how their body works, and to have the support to get answers about their health. She has worked with hundreds of clients to create a body they love with food they love.
When she's not working with clients, you'll find her enjoying everything Colorado has to offer from hiking to camping to craft beers.