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Cooking with recipes is a way of life. Lately I’ve found myself explaining how to enter them into MyFitnessPal for accurate tracking, so I’m writing up a quick post to help. Here’s how you go about entering your recipes into MyFitnessPal, so you can accurately log them in to your food journals.

The best way to do this is to actually create the recipes in MyFitnessPal. Here are the steps to follow:

  1. Go to Create a Recipe
  2. From a cookbook you select manually enter the ingredients or you can paste a link from a website to do a bulk import.
  3. Then log all of the ingredients you’re going to use that have calories (you can skip spices, herbs, etc.). If you are doing a bulk important from a website proof the ingredients that MFP pulled to make sure they are accurate ingredients.
  4. Confirm or enter the recipe title.
  5. Set servings at 1 (You’ll update this later).
  6. You’ll actually want to follow the recipe for the final step. Weigh the final total weight of the entire recipe (minus the dish that’s holding it) in grams.
  7. Then go back and update the number of servings in the recipe to equal the weight of the recipe in grams. See the image below as an example of the weight of the entire soup contents entered as the number of servings (4123 grams).

Then when you serve the recipe to yourself weigh it out in grams. Use the weight in grams as the number of servings to get your total calories and macros accurate in your daily log.

It may seem tedious at first, but if you think in terms of doing only one or two recipes per week you’ll soon have a whole catalog of recipes that are done and ready for regular use. Start with your staples first to really get the hang of it!

2 thoughts on “Entering recipes in MyFitnessPal”
  1. Avatar Anne Davis

    Lisa, I entered one of my recipes as you’ve described above, but when I tried to log it, it would only allow me to enter 8 as the maximum number of servings. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

  2. Try saving it and then going back in to edit the number of servings. It should allow you to update it with the weight of the recipe.

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