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Creating a recipe in MyFitnessPal may intimidate you but it shouldn’t! With just a little practice and patience and following these steps, you’ll be a pro in no time and will be using this awesome feature! We will show you step by step using our meatloaf recipe as an example. We suggest you read through the whole tutorial once before beginning.

When creating a recipe, you will need to have a notepad or paper and pen to allow the ingredients and measurements to be documented and adjusted if needed as well as to do some math calculations. This way, if there is any error while entering data into MyFitnessPal you can look back to your recipe and notes and adjust accordingly.

Step one: Gather all ingredients needed for the meal. Have your food scale and bowls as well as pan ready.

     

Step two: Turn on the scale [TARE] button. Press [UNIT] button until you get desired unit of measure we will use grams in this example.  Place empty bowl onto the scale and hit the [TARE] button again to zero out.

           

Step three: Place ingredients into bowl, one at a time, according to recipe instructions and continue to press the [TARE] button after each ingredient is weighed in order to zero out the scale and get a precise measurement for each ingredient. Also, write down the weight of each ingredient as you go.

                       

Step four: Once all ingredients have been weighed and measured, weigh the pan by itself (you will need to write this down). (Again, press [TARE] to zero out the scale before placing the pan for measurement). Now you can mix all ingredients and place into pan and bake according to recipe.

                       

Step five: Now it is time to enter the ingredients into MyFitnessPal as a Recipe so that you can make this again and simply enter your serving amount with the ease of a few clicks.

Open up MyFitnessPal app. On the Home Screen you will see three dots on the lower right corner of the screen with [More] written underneath. Click […] and you will see a screen that lists a number of options, one of them- Meals, Recipes & Foods. Click on the right arrow which will lead you to the next screen. Recipes, Meals and Foods have their own tabs. Recipe Tag is highlighted by default so simply click on [Create a Recipe] at the bottom of the screen. You are given two choices: Add foods from the Web or Enter Ingredients Manually. Click Enter Manually and create a Recipe Name next to [Title], enter 1 for [Servings] (just for now but you will go back and edit Servings at the end).

  

 

After you enter the Recipe Name and Serving of 1 (will edit at the end), Click the Right arrow at the top right of the screen which will take you to the Add Ingredients Screen. Click [Add Ingredient] and type food by name to search or click [Scan] on the lower right of the screen to scan the barcode of the package. You will then be able to manually adjust the serving size of each ingredient based on the weights written down earlier.

    

 

Continue adding ingredients until everything has been entered and adjusted if needed, then click the arrow in the upper right corner

to continue. You will now see your Recipe’s Calories and Macro breakdown. This is for the ENTIRE MEAL and now it is time to go back and edit to allow the macros to be set per the serving of your choice.

  

 

Step 6: Weigh the cooked meatloaf in the pan and subtract the weight of the pan only (this was done in Step 4) from the total weight (meatloaf in pan). Click [Edit Recipe] and click on the 1 in servings to change it to the weight of the meatloaf only. Ex; Meatloaf equaled 555g once the pan weight of 559g was subtracted from the total weight of the meatloaf in pan which was 1,114g. Servings now becomes 555g. You can then click [SAVE] or [SAVE & LOG IT].

Step 7: Finally, once you choose to log it, you will edit the Number of Servings to the weight of your portion. Ex; If you slice the meatloaf and weigh your portion which equaled 125g, the Number of Servings becomes the weight of 125g. Once you make this change, you will see that the macros are now broken down into the portion you served.

  

 

Here is a look at what was written in our notebook while creating the recipe.

 

 

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