Program
Now that you know how many calories you should eat per day, it
is time to devise a meal plan. You go to the daily meal planner and start
selecting your food. First, you select the food that you want to eat:
And the meal planner is filled in:
You can change the amount you want to eat by clicking the asterisks button. (For instance, you may want 2 pieces of French Toast, instead of 3). By clicking the "R" button, you can view the recipe. As you select you food for each meal and select your desired amounts, the nutritional values for your total day of food is updated:
If you reach the RDA (Recommended Dietary Allowance) for sodium or cholesterol, the box will appear red, to let you know. When you reach the amounts for fiber and potassium, they will appear green.
When you have selected a day's worth of food that you like, you have many options:
You can save the menu (or view previously saved menus).
You can print the menu, creating a daily journal.
You can export your menu to the grocery planner, where a grocery list will be generated from your selections.
You can create a new menu.
You can export your menu to the weekly meal planner.
The weekly menu planner plans up to 7 days of meals. For instance, most recipes make 4 servings. If you are cooking for 2 people, a typical menu will make 2 days of food. If you create 3 menus, that is 6 days, and so forth. Once you have your week of food updated in the weekly menu planner, you can print out your week of food. The print out looks like this:
When I create a typical 1500 calorie meal, I try to select about 375 calories for breakfast, lunch, and supper, and about 185 calories for the mini-meals. This keeps the meals fairly consistent. Therefore, when selecting a lunch, the user can select any of the 3 possibilities. Note, after the meal (such as "Lunch #1"), there is number, such as "(x3)". That means the user eats this particular meal three times during the week. On the right side is the average daily nutritional breakdown during the week based on these selections.
From here, the entire week of food can be exported to the grocery list. For me, I create my menu, export it to the grocery list and then repeat for my wife, who usually eats the same food, just less, with some personal preferences figured in.
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Click here if you are interested in a copy.