Changes to how meals work
We recently made a change to how Saved Meals work. Previously, if you saved a group of foods as a meal, when you added that meal to your diary, you'd only see one entry, i.e. "Eggs and bacon". Now, when you add a meal to your diary, we now will create entries for all of the individual foods. So, for example, you'll see a separate entry for eggs, and a separate entry for bacon.
If you were using Saved Meals as they were originally intended, i.e. a grouping of individual foods that you regularly eat together, then this change should be very helpful. Many of us will generally eat the same foods for a meal, but may make small changes, i.e. two eggs one day, three eggs the next, or maybe sausage instead of bacon. By adding the individual foods as separate entries, you can now add the meal to quickly add a group of foods, but then easily make small changes in your diary, tweaking quantities, deleting some foods and adding others, etc.
As a further benefit, if you think the changes are more permanent, i.e. you always ate three eggs, but now you are switching to only two eggs, then you can "Resave" the meal. Just make the changes you'd like to make in your diary, and hit "Remember Meal". You'll see a new button labeled "or, Replace and Existing Meal". If you'd like to overwrite an existing meal, click on that button, and then select the meal you'd like to replace. Your meal will be resaved with the new components.
If, however, you were using Saved Meals as a way to calculate recipes, then this change probably contains some drawbacks. For example, if you had saved the ingredients of your Taco salad as a meal, i.e. "Taco salad", then you probably would prefer to only see a single entry, "Taco salad", when adding that item to your diary. Now that we are adding all of the individual components, your diary has become more cluttered.
Our plan to address that is to create a recipe calculator. You'll be able to enter in the ingredients to your recipe, calculate it's nutritional contents, and save it as a single new food. When you add that recipe to your diary, it'll be added as one entry - all of the individual ingredients will NOT appear.
Creating a recipe calculator is our top priority for the website, and I'm literally designing it as we speak. If, as we flesh it out a bit more, we feel it will take a while to implement, then we'll try to add some kind of option to revert back to the old way we added meals. But if we think we can have it ready within a reasonable time period, we will probably just skip adding the option and instead try to get the recipe calculator out faster.
Hope that all makes sense. if you have any questions or concerns, just let us know in the comments below.
Thanks, and hope you're all enjoying the site.
Mike & Al



Thanks for all of your hard work!! I love the site!!
THANKS~ I personally see everthing expanded that one single meal so i see what all went into my body.
Thanks again!
These are fantastic improvements! Thank you!!
I could be overlooking this feature, but is there any way to share meals with myfitnesspal friends? Some of my friends are family members and we eat many meals together. We find that it would be convenient if we could somehow locate and add the meals that one person has already created. We noticed the sharing of diaries, but could never find any feature to share meals.
Love the site ... Thanks!
And I love the changes to the saved meals.
You guys are so creative and responsive. Thankyou so much!
This would make it easier to find food items when filling in a new day's worth of them.
The new idea of the Recipe Calculator is great !
And if not, that's cool, too. I can always download my BS monitor and print it out. Extra time/work etc but not impossible.
A joint link with Runkeeper.com would also be great but that one might just be me being lazy!
Great job on the overall design with the ease of tracking calories plus a lot more ..... this format allows easy input and daily tracking of what you eat.
This is the end of my fifth day and I love it. Had dropped 5 pounds when I started ... looking forward to next week at weighin ....