How can I use Cronometer as a meal-planner?
Can someone advise me? As it stands, Cronometer seems to be a diary, not a planner. And that was great when I was a beginner, but as I've worked on my nutrition, I find I need the ability to plan. Currently Cronometer it lets me enter my food and it tells me what the nutritional content is. For planning, it would be SUPER helpful to allow me to enter a nutrient and get a filter-able list of foods that will provide a descending amount of that nutrient. Currently I find I have to do a ton of searching outside of your app in order to plan a healthy day's food intake that matches my dietary choices, preferences and restrictions. I would much rather get the job done inside the app. The oracle isn't an effective planning solution, because the Oracle can't be filtered to my dietary restrictions -- I am eating whole foods, never a "meal" or a "dish" prepared by a company, so a large percentage of the Oracle's responses are useless to me. Help!
Comments
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Not sure if it would help you but what I suggest clients do (and what I do in my own practice) is spend time putting together custom meals and snacks that I label based on their nutrient profile (e.g. 20 g protein oatmeal). Not only does this save me time but it helps me to fill in any nutrient gaps missing from the upcoming week.
Kind regards,
Susan Macfarlane, MScA, RD
Registered Dietitian Nutritionist
cronometer.com
As always, any and all postings here are covered by our T&Cs:
https://forums.cronometer.com/discussion/27/governing-terms-and-disclaimer -
The Oracle allows you to "Search Categories". You can filter out prepared meals.
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On the web version of the app, you can go Foods --> Ask The Oracle and search for a particular nutrient, asking the system to rank it by most per gram, or most per kCal. You can include or exclude certain food categories.
I meal-plan about 3/4 of my meals. Most of us have 5-6 things we always eat. I put those in as recipes. For example, I have recipes:
- Breakfast oats: rolled oats 60g, almonds 15g, walnuts 15g, milk 200ml, honey 1 tablespoon
- Garden salad: spinach 50g, capsicum 50g, black olives 50g, cucumber 50g, tomatoes 100g
- Bolognese: olive oil 50g, garlic 20g, onions 200g, carrots 200g, celery 200g, capsicum 200g, zucchini 200g, tinned tomatoes 800g, 10% lean minced beef 500g.
For the first two I can just put them in at the meal's time, and note if they're a full (x1), half (x0.5) or whatever amount. For the sauce, once the recipe's in there I can say I'm having 350g or whatever of it, and it'll go through and figure the rest out for me.
With a few decent recipes I find I get 100% of my nutritional requirements in at least 2/3 of all the numbers. As I reach the end of the day I might be short on one or two areas. From experience I know that certain snacks will deal with that - smoked salmon will give me protein, omega-3s and B12; spinach will give me vitamin K, strawberries vitamin C, and so on.
Each week I look back at the nutrition report to see the average. If I am going over or under certain targets, I then adjust. "I keep being low on zinc and iron, I probably need to add some beef."
In this way you effectively evolve yourself a meal plan, and change from the 5-6 meals you used to always have to a new 5-6 meals - ones which, we hope, will better-fulfil your current needs.
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Is this request basically the same as https://forums.cronometer.com/discussion/2815/meal-plan-builder ?
