The groups and recipe manager was introduced to the Perfect Diet Tracker in version 3.2.
The manager lets you create new groups, add and delete items from them, and quickly insert whole groups, or smaller serving sizes or portions from them into your diary.
Opening the groups & recipe manager from the diary
The toolbar has three options, ‘Group’, ‘Create’ and ‘Insert’
The ‘Create’ option will look at the items you currently have selected in your diary. If you have two or more items selected, it will ask you for a name for your new group, and add the items to the new group automatically. If you a single item selected the ‘create’ option will ask you for a name for your group and create an empty group for you. Once your group has been created you will be taken to the recipe manager screen so you can edit the group, add or remove items etc.
The ‘Insert’ option is used to load the group and recipe manager so you can insert a group into your diary.
The ‘Group’ option is the smart option, it will look to see if you have anything selected in your diary, if you do it will select the ‘create’ option for you, if you do not it will select the ‘insert option’.
You can also load the group & recipe manager by clicking the ‘edit’ menu in the menu bar and selecting ‘Add food from a group’.
The group & recipe manager
The group & recipe manage will be shown when you click on the ‘insert’ button in the group toolbar, or immediately after creating a new group.
(1) The first box will list all your groups, in the example we just have a single group ‘Ham Sandwich’.
(2) Immediately below you will see a list of the items in the selected group, and the quantity of each item.
The tab bar
Along the top of the manager window, you will see a tab bar.
This bar lets you quickly jump to groups or recipes starting with the appropriate letter, or perform a search.
The group buttons
The buttons to the right of the list of your groups are fairly self-explanatory.
Clicking ‘new’ will create a new group, ‘rename’ lets you rename a group title and ‘remove’ lets you delete a group. The ‘help’ button opens a small reminder window to show you these options within the application.
Editing items within a group
To edit items within a group, simply click the appropriate icon.
(1) Click on the ‘+’ icon to the left of ‘item’ to add a new item to the group.
(2) Selecting the arrow icon lets you change the quantity of the item within the group
(3) Selecting the ‘x’ icon lets you delete an item from the group.
Adding the group to your diary
To add the group to your diary you will want to specify the portion size, and the meal you would like to add the group to.
The portion size is simply the size of the serving or portion. If you would like to insert one of everything in the group, simply enter 1. If however you have created a recipe for a pie, and eaten 1/3rd of the pie you can enter 1/3, or 0.3. You can also enter multiple numbers, for example, if you create a group ‘coffee with milk and sugar’, you can enter 2 or 3 to add 2 or 3 servings to your diary.
To select the meal simply click on the meal box to list the meal titles.
Once you have selected your portion size and meal name, click ‘Add to diary’ to add the items to your diary.
Sharing a group with other users *
If you have multiple users set up on the computer, the software will display an additional ‘Share’ button.
This button lets you share any groups of recipes you create with other users so they can add the same group easily. Simply select a group or recipe and then click the ‘Share’ button to copy the group to another user.
* Feature added in version 3.2.2.
Nutritional profile
To the right of your group, you will see a breakdown of the nutritional profile of the group.
This can help you reach a target nutritional profile as you can vary the ingredients or members of your group to achieve the profile you are aiming for.
* Feature added in version 3.2.3
It would be nice if this would insert the group name in the food diary rather than the individual items. With anything moderately complicated the food diary becomes very long.
Perhaps a expansion triangle, similar to the meal breakdown would allow you to expand the recipe and see it’s parts.
Thanks for the suggestion Steve. This is currently being worked on, as you suggest it will work in a similar way to the meals, an icon will let you hide or reveal all the items in the meal or recipe. The update should be available soon!
Here’s another suggestion:
Display the macronutrient ‘wheel’ while creating recipes. A good example use case for this happened the other night while creating a recipe that had a sauce.
Adding a few grams of butter threw the ratio way off, but changing to cornflour brought things closer to the right alignment. A wheel would be an easy way to visualize the ratios as you create the recipe.
You could extend the idea to help suggest ratios that would bring the overall daily ratios back into balance, if you got off on one meal or the other.
Hi Steve,
Version 3.2.3 has now been released and both suggestions have been implemented. You will now see a nutritional breakdown for the group in the manager and any groups added to the diary with this version (or later) are now fully collapsable.
Thanks again for the suggestions!
I am trying the trial version and was having trouble setting up a recipe for a soup. The recipe has a lot of ingredients and makes about 10 servings. For example I used 4 leeks; do I enter the full recipe amounts or do I only enter 1/10th of item.
Thanks
If you enter the full recipe (i.e. in the case 4 leeks etc), you can then select a serving or portion size of ‘1/10’ or ‘0.1’ when you add the recipe to your diary and the software will automatically adjust the quantities for your serving size.
Here’s a tip for entering portions of recipes. I put the yield (how many servings the recipe makes) in the recipe title, so that it’s easy to remember later, and my food diary is easier to interpret. So I might have “Tuna Casserole (8 servings, 1/2 c ea)” or “Homemade Pesto (3/4 c)”. Then if I ate 1 tbsp of the pesto, I know I need to enter 1/24 in the portion field when adding it to my diary (since there are 24 tablespoons in 3/4 cup).
It would be neat if the Group & Recipe Manager could somehow help with storing this info, but I guess that’s more of a recipe-specific feature that wouldn’t necessarily make sense if you use it for groups of foods frequently eaten together.
I often make big pots of “stew” – for example, black bean chili – and I weigh the ingredients as I cook, and the final result when I’m done.
Let’s say that I make some chili and I enter all the ingredients in PDT, group them, and the final weight is 2367 grams. Following Julia’s hint, I enter the yield, 2367, in the recipe title.
Now, suppose I eat a 224 gram portion. Can I enter “224/2367” in the portion field and have Perfect Diet Tracker calculate the nutrition values for this portion properly?
I’ve used at least half a dozen programs similar to PDT and this one looks to be the best so far. Thanks.
Although we had never thought of this way of using the portions entry box, it will work, yes.
Any sum entered into the box is evaluated, originally designed so you could enter 1/2 for half etc, but as 224/2367 is simply another fraction it will work the same way and seem to be a great way to measure portions!
If I edit a recipe that I have already created and used in my diary (for example, add 1 more oz of pasta), will the re-evaluate past diary entries that used that group of foods, or only new entries going forward?
Any edits to recipes do not affect past diary entries. If you have create a recipe group in the past, then adjust your recipe the new recipe will be used for all future entries, while old entries will use the recipe you used at the time you entered them.
PDT works great with a single person, but with families or more than one person it gets a bit complicated. Are there any suggestions for ‘portions’? I.e. I can create a group (recipe) in one user, and then distribute ‘portions’ to the entire family. This would save a *huge* amount of time with multiple persons, especially if you don’t have to log in/out to update each user.
One tip which is not always that obvious is to use the right mouse button, or ctrl-click on a mac. You can quickly copy items from your own diary to other users this way without needing to log into the other user accounts, or copy across then log in to make small adjustments to quantities etc.
I would like to know if there is a way add the whole recipe? Not just the ingredients, but the instructions too.
We are afraid it is not possible to add instructions in the current release, but I can see if the ‘roadmap’ for the software a notes field should be added in a free update so this should help.
I use my own gluten free flour mix in recipes calling for flour. It includes almond flour, sorghum flour, potato starch and potato flour — not similar to anything that’s commercially available, but it works great for my husband who is sensitive to gluten and diabetic. I created a group/recipe for the flour mix. I’d like to use this group in other recipes. Is there a way to do this?
Your best option Linda would be to insert the group you have created at the moment into your diary, along with the other components of the recipe you want to create, then select all the items while holding down the shift key, and once they are all selected click on the ‘create’ button next to groups, just below the diary. This will ask you for a name for the group, and create a new group for all the items, including your flour mix.
Groups are great way to track recipes – I use a Vitamix for healthy drinks and end up with 6-7 items – easy to get total cals etc.. if all weights entered. Usually take a glass (maybe 150 g) in Am and put rest in refrigerator for rest of week (maybe 1600 grams).
Would be great if had option to enter in number of grams or Oz’s as part of a group over just a serving serving. End up with strange things like .129 of a serving. If did in grams calculate no. cals etc. per gram and thats what gets put in next day. Easy to measure weight of a drink or soup and use that with the Group next day or forever – over looking up what it was as a serving and figure out should be .223 or whatever…
This is a great program – very weel done … Use it constantly – Thanks John
Thanks for the feedback John and suggestion. We will see if we can get this into the app, in the meantime you can let the Perfect Diet Tracker do the sums for you by entering a fraction into the quantity box (in your example enter 150 / 1600 into the box), this would let the Perfect Diet Tracker work out the serving size. You will still end up with a serving size of ‘0.093’ and we will see if we can make that a little better, but in the meantime it should save you time as you do not need to do any calculations.
Being diabetic, I would like to see a location that I can enter my glucose meter readings for that meal and exercising. Having a meter reading location for each meal would benefit me greatly, i can then TRACK my meals with my diabetes. Make it an option, button click if your diabetic to add another line in the nutritional side.
I’ve just recently started using this program and I just have one suggestion, in the group recipe section I am unable to insert recipes by weight. Example – I cooked a large pot of rice to freeze and to serve for a few days so I don’t cook everyday. Recipe included 1kg rice, 1 tin of mixed veg, 1 tin tomatoes, 1 onion, and other ingredients. I created a recipe using the weights according to the packets, when I served myself 100g of the rice I wasn’t able to insert the weight into my food diary I had to reduce the serving to 0.15 of a portion which no doubt is an incorrect calorie calculation.
I do this with a lot of my meals as I am not cooking for one is it possible for you to add the option of inserting the weight of a recipe serving as well as what is already available?