How to Use an Online Meal Planner to Balance Your Diet
You already know you are supposed to eat a balanced diet, and that you need a certain amount of each kind of vitamin and mineral to be considered a normal, healthy human being. This article will show you how to use an online meal planner to eat foods that you like while balancing your diet perfectly.
Things You'll Need
- Internet browser
- Account with meal planner software licensee, if applicable
Instructions
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Select an online meal planner. The one we will use as an example throughout this article is the Ultimate Meal Planner from Vitabot. The Ultimate Meal Planner is an interactive report card and food suggestion system. It is used by the U.S. military, Lockheed Martin, Warner Brother Studios, and a plethora of health clubs great and small to help their employees and clients achieve a balanced diet. The program uses the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutritional database to suggest foods that fill out a user's U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance (USRDA). The interface is takes a few minutes to learn.
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Get your bearings. When you first log in to your online meal planner, you will probably be presented with a "journal" or daily meal planner for breakfast lunch, dinner, and snacks. In the case of the Ultimate Meal Planner, there is the meal journal at center, an options menu up top, a search box for selecting foods that you want to eat, and a nutrition report card at left (all F's at first, since no foods are listed yet).
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Start adding foods to your meals. There are three basic ways to do so. The first way is to use the search box to look for foods you like. Search for a basic food, any food. There are 6,000 food items in the database, so experiment to see how creative the system will allow you to be in your searches. When the food item appears, you can select it and add it to a meal plan, specifying the portion you would like. Do this a few times until your meal planner is full and you start seeing A's appear in the report card. It does not have to be perfect at this point. Just get started.
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The second way to add foods is to get suggestions or click on the letter grades themselves. A list of food suggestions will appear, ranked in order of how well they fill out your existing meal plan from a nutritional standpoint. This is the cool part. Go ahead and click one of the suggestions to add it to your meal plan. After playing with the food choices and the portions, the report card should eventually go up to straight A's.
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Add food to your meal plan by using a preexisting meal plan. You can click on the appropriate icon to add someone else's work to your meal plan. You can adjust the meal plan according to your tastes by adding or deleting foods, getting suggestions, or clicking on the letter grades. Voila! New meal plan.
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Plan for the future. You can make meal plans for the future, logging them into your calendar as you go along creating meal plans. So how varied you can get your food schedule. Keep it interesting, and remember: you can always change items according to your tastes.
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Tips & Warnings
Online meal planners come in many formats ranging from ready-made to completely customizable. Some offer a series of complicated recipes and one-size-fits-all meals, while others give you very little to go on at the outset. Some online meal planners are free, others are used by subscription. Check around for your favorite interface.
If you have any medical problems or special nutritional requirements, you should always consult a doctor. The technology of an online meal planner is wonderful and incredibly tailored to you, but it is not yet perfect for all people at all times.
