Fitness tech 101: How do I add a recipe on DailyBurn?

July 20, 3:53 PMFitness Tech ExaminerKathy Ahn

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Fitness Tech Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Steel cut oats with bananas and almonds

I've written about free online food diaries before and how they can be helpful in losing weight. I use DailyBurn (formerly Gyminee) for my food log and think the UI of their web site is cleaner and less cluttered than LiveStrong's Daily Plate or SparkPeople, both of which display a lot of ads.

DailyBurn has a premium account for $45 a year. The Pro account shows you more advanced nutrition information, allows you to plan meals in advance, lets you track custom data points in their BodyTracker (like your blood pressure or hours of sleep), gives you access to advanced reporting and workout programs created by trainers. If these things are important to you, you might want to check out some of the other free online sites: Daily Plate and SparkPeople both offer advanced nutrition information, and SparkPeople and GymTechnik (which only tracks workouts, not food) both offer workout routines you can choose from. The DailyBurn's free account lets you track carbs, calories, protein, and fat in the nutrition area, and lets you keep track of your workouts. The large user contributed foods database, ease of use, and clean UI might be worth losing some features depending on your needs.

When you eat foods regularly together, it's easier to add them as a group than to have to individually add each food item. You can use the DailyBurn's Add a New Recipe feature to add favorite recipes and to group foods together. For example, one of my morning staples is oatmeal with bananas and almonds so I have a recipe for that so I can easily add it to my food log.

Start with recipe details

To add a recipe, start at the Add a New Recipe page. Enter the recipe name (if the name is not unique, it will ask you to rename it). Since you're creating a simple grouping of food instead of a real recipe, it should be easy to fill in the serving size field. Use a food scale if you have one, but if you don't you can use easy to understand terms. I used "1 bowl" for my morning oatmeal grouping. Now add the number of servings your recipe makes. This is important because it calculates the calories for each serving based on this number.

In the recipe description field, it helps to enter the measurements of the individual foods in standard cooking terms (cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons). Sometimes the nutrition information is in a different format (ounces or grams) and using standard cooking measurements makes it easy for other people to use your recipe if they want to. Having a food scale helps but you can use also use this calculator and conversion chart. Don't forget to add the recipe instructions. See the screenshot below.

Add an image

One of the great things about DailyBurn's food database is the pictures so if you can, add a picture of your recipe. When you look at your daily food log, it displays all the images of the food items you've eaten so you can see at a glance what you've consumed over the day. You can take a photo with your digital camera or phone and download it to your copmuter, then upload it to the DailyBurn server. Once you've uploaded your photo you can use the image cropping feature to get it to the right dimensions. The images are square so if you don't choose to crop your photo, it will distort it to make it fit into a square.

Click on the "Choose File" button (see screenshot below) and select the image file. Click on "Upload Image" once you've selected your image file.

Once you've uploaded an image you'll see the image crop tool. You can put your mouse on the image and move it around to center it where you want. You can also use the slider underneath to zoom in and out of your photo. Click on the "Crop Image" button when you're done. Or you can choose not to crop the image at all and just click on the "Continue to Step 2" button.

Add the ingredients

Next, you'll need to search for the ingredients for your recipe. The DailyBurn food database is large and lets users add their own foods so you can readily find common foods. Enter the food item in the search box. When you see the results, click on the plus sign icon to add it to your recipe. You'll see the list of ingredients you've already added at the bottom under "List of Ingredients".

Save your recipe

When you're done, simply hit the "Save Recipe" button. Now you can easily add this grouping of food to your food log anytime you have it.