Recurring daily entries

Donna

I take the same vitamins, minerals, salt etc each day. And each day I have to look up and add to the food diary. Is there anyway to bulk add them?
Donna

Hilary

Hi @Donna , You can't have them automatically add every day but you can definitely make it easier for yourself! Add all of your Vitamins, mineral, etc., to one "Recipe". Once you have created a recipe of your supplements that you take every day just add one serving of that recipe to your diary every day!

You can create a Recipe by selecting "Create new Recipe" in the Foods Tab. Add ingredients by selecting the green "+" button and searching for your ingredients in the search dialogue that appears. You can also create a recipe from previously entered ingredients by multiselecting all the ingredients entered into your diary on a specific day; right click on them and select "Create recipe from selected items". Once you have saved your recipe you will be able to search for the recipe's name in the search dialogue on both your web and mobile versions of Cronometer.
You can create a recipe on your mobile app by selecting the "My Food" tab and selecting "Add New Recipe". You can add ingredients by selecting the Orange button "Add ingredients". Don't forget to select a convenient serving size for the size of recipe you normally consume!

logicalparadox

Bump. I'd also like to see this feature.

Like the OP, I take an assortment of supplements everyday. This is a chore to add manually, so I've created a recipe for "daily supplements". Just as good, right? No. Let me explain.

First, sometimes I adjust my supplements based on what Cronometer is telling me. That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? First, I used Cronometer just for dietary analysis and tracking (ex post facto), but the real power comes when you can spot dietary deficiencies and take control reactively. If I've eaten a lot of magnesium rich foods, I may decide to only take 1 supplement instead of two, for example. Well, because a recipe is a single object that doesn't allow editing within the context of a specific diary entry, there's no way to account for this without removing the recipe and manually adding individual supplements. Or, you can get more and more complicated by having specific versions of your "daily supplements" recipe for common adjustments. One recipe for the everyday normal regimen, another modified version for more or less of this or that supplement. It quickly becomes cumbersome.

Second, and worse, the recipes, once created, cannot be edited without changing your ENTIRE HISTORY. So, if I decide to make changes to my daily supplement regimen, I have to create a new version of the recipe; I can't just edit the existing recipe, because that will dynamically update all my past entries for the recipe. That causes inaccuracies with historical data. Again, managing this can be a chore.

Lastly, the number of items I consume on a daily basis is quite high. Everyday I'm going to have my same 2 cups of coffee, supplements, and probably an avocado, and a few other things. When I'm on a specific dietary regimen (like trying to shed a few holiday pounds), my eating may become even more habitual. Adding lots of recipes ends up becoming almost as much work as adding individual items. I could just create recipes containing all of those things, like "my everyday stuff" with coffee, supplements, and standard lunch/snack items all rolled into one. That makes it easy, but see items 1 and 2 for the flaw in that strategy. All I have to do then is decide I want to replace my avocado with some dried coconut and now I have to remove the whole recipe and manually enter things or else juggle lots of recipes for different augmentations to my typical habits.

It also obfuscates things... when you add a recipe, it shows up in your diary as a single item, without a breakdown. Especially on mobile apps, it can be easy to lose track of what these contain. The more things (and the more different things) in a given recipe, the more problematic this becomes. Again, it comes back to a larger investment in time and daily administrative overhead.

So, recurring or default items would help with all these. If every day my diary could start off with some default items that I could then remove or edit, that would be more flexible and clear. For example, if every day my diary started off with my typical supplements, avocado, dark chocolate for a snack and coffees, then I could simple adjust servings or remove those items to account for deviations from the norm. The supplements I never modify, I could leave in a single recipe, and the ones I sometimes skip or adjust I could have added individually so I could remove or modify them as needed.

It doesn't seem like this would be a hard feature to add, but would give more power and flexibility to users who want to be more consistent with tracking their food, but are struggling with the work required to manage and add accurate accounts of their foods. Time savers are always big wins for users.

Hilary

@logicalparadox you can use the explode recipe feature to see a breakdown of your recipe more clearly in your diary and to edit/delete specific items from your recipe. This should solve the problems you have listed!
To explode a recipe in your web browser, right click on your diary entry and select "explode recipe". On your mobile version, swipe right and select the gear icon, then select "Explode recipe" from the list.

BeeHealthy

My supplement nutrient contents in a recipe just aren’t showing up in my nutrition report for the selected date and if I explode the recipe the amounts of each supplement aren’t what I entered (eg says 0.03 instead of 1 capsule) so then I have to correct them all manually. Sometimes at first if I edited the serving amount (last tab) within the recipe this fixed it so it would show in the nutrition summary but most of the time doesn’t work anymore. But every time I go in to edit the recipe the serving amount is back to g (it should be whole serving or recipe which is what I saved it as) and I have to adjust it to full again but like I said this still doesn’t fix the issue. This is turning out to be unusable. I take 20 supplements a day and can’t enter them every day. Even using recipe function if it works correctly it still takes a great deal of time.

BeeHealthy

I should add that I do have “include supplements” selected and I’m using custom range for the correct date.

sheclimber

Another vote for this feature

Aericstotle

Upvote. I'm all for automating anything and everything possible. I imagine most people take at the bare minimum a daily multivitamin. On top of that, there are a handful of other supplements I take daily, and having them add recurringly would be super useful.

gigapus

It would be a useful feature, but now I just use the multi-select option then copy and paste, it takes seconds.

Nutritarian

I agree, this would be useful

delipidation

Not sure whether this is a workaround or a mini-lifehack, but I have a diary group named Morning Supplements (which includes a couple of biometrics that I record every morning) at the beginning of the day and another named Evening Supplements at the end. Those two groups, along with the group named Breakfast, change very little from day to day. I start each day by using the Copy Previous Day feature, highlight Lunch and Dinner, hit the Delete key, update the biometrics, and I'm pretty well started on my day.