MyFitnessPal Blog

We just launched a minor new feature on the site: you can now "quick add" calories only. If you already know how many calories something is, but don't want to bother with looking up all the ingredients/foods/etc., or if you just want to add a rough guess to your diary until you have time to look up the specific items, you can now quickly enter just the calories into your diary.  

Just click on "Add Food" as you did before, and then just above the search box, you'll now see a link labeled "Quick add calories only" - click on it, and a box will appear where you can enter in the amount of calories you'd like to add.  Click "Add Calories", and a diary entry will be created that lists those calories only.

Hopefully this will help save a few steps when you just need to quickly add calories to your diary. 

We'll be rolling out this feature to the iPhone app as well, so look for it in a future update.

If you have any questions/comments/concerns, please let us know in the comments area below.

Thanks, and hope you're enjoying the site!

Mike & Al 

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 

Good news - Apple approved our iPhone app update which fixes the meal crash.  For those of you who have been experiencing crashes with the app, please install the update ASAP.  The app should no longer crash once the update has been installed.

We're so sorry for the inconvenience.  Hopefully all of the kinks in the new version of our app have been worked out, and we can move from bug fixing to new features.  If you still experience any issues, please let us know ASAP and we'll get them fixed up immediately.

Thanks, and hope you are enjoying the app and the site.

Mike & Al