How To Use Custom Meals In Cronometer
We’ve just introduced a simplified approach to our Custom Recipes functionality. In walks, Custom Meals. All users on the latest version of the app will have the ability to create Custom Meals, which allow you to combine items into one entry.
What's A Custom Meal?
Custom Meals allow you to bundle foods, recipes, supplements and beverages into one item – saving you time while logging things you consume every day.
When To Use Custom Meals Or Custom Recipes
Our new Custom Meals feature is meant to be a simplified version of Custom Recipes, so you won’t be able to set a number of serving sizes for the whole meal or use any advanced features like ‘set cooked weight’.
Think of it like this – if you’re always eating the same thing for breakfast on weekdays, this is when you would create a Custom Meal. Call it ‘Weekday Breakfast’ and add your items – a smoothie, two coffees, creamer and a teaspoon of sugar.
Custom Meals can include Custom Recipes – so if you already have a recipe created for your morning coffee, you can add that as part of the meal.
Custom Recipes, however, should be used when cooking and wanting to track an entire recipe, such as a casserole, where there may be several servings within the one recipe. Gold users can use the Recipe Importer to do this extra quick!
How To Create A Custom Meal
You can create a Custom Meal from the Foods tab in either the mobile or web app. Check the user manual article for detailed instructions – click here for web or click here for mobile.
Gold subscribers can also multi-select ingredients in their diary and create a meal from that selection using the three-dot menu in the top right corner of the diary page.
Adding To Your Diary
Add the meal to your diary the way you would any other food entry. Start adding a food and search for the name of the meal.
While searching for the food, you can tap over to the ‘Custom’ category tab, which will filter the food search database to only your Custom Foods, Custom Meals and Custom Recipes.
Explode It
Once a meal has been added to your diary, you can explode it which will create individual food entries for each food item in the meal. On mobile, swipe right on the meal and tap the ⋮ icon or on web, right-click on the meal then select ‘Explode’.
By exploding a meal, you can easily adjust measurements for individual items or delete an item altogether. Making changes to items after you’ve exploded a meal will not alter the meal itself.
Why You Should Use Custom Meals
The biggest benefit is that it saves you time! You’ll no longer have to log each food, beverage or supplement separately. Hot tip: if you take multiple supplements or vitamins every day, create a meal with all of them included so you can add it in one fell swoop.
Gold Users Log Faster
Gold users can schedule Custom Meals to repeat, saving even more time logging.
Gold users also have the ability to multi-select items that are already added to their Diary and create a meal from that selection. From your Diary screen, click the three dot menu in the upper right, select ‘multi-select’, choose all of the food entries you want included in the meal, click the three dot menu again and select ‘create meal from selection’.
Need some more reasons to go gold? Click here.
