Clicking the thumbs down next to a food in the meal plan will prevent the generator from suggesting it in the future. Say you never want to see split pea soup again, click the block symbol and it won't show up anymore. Your rated foods show up at the bottom of your settings page in case you ever want to unblock them.
Blocking is useful for temporarily removing foods that you're tired of as well. Maybe there's a scrambled eggs recipe that you like, but you're sick of it and the planner is telling you to eat it 3 times a week? Just block it temporarily and remove it from the block list in a few weeks.
Keep in mind that blocking a food won't remove it from existing meal plans. If you have a weekly meal plan, browse through the entire week to block things you don't like first, and then regenerate the whole week's plan.
What's the difference between blocking a food item and adding the keyword to the food filters?
The "block food" feature is more specific. Blocking a recipe only blocks that specific recipe, and blocking an ingredient also blocks recipes containing that specific ingredient. If a similar recipe contains a frozen version of that ingredient, it won't be blocked.
The food filters remove dishes from your plan if it matches any attribute about the recipe. So adding the "chicken" or "cinammon" keyword to the food filters will remove any recipes matching that keyword in its title or ingredients.
We offer both free and premium accounts. The free account offers you the power to generate one day of meal plans at time, as well as track your intake. The premium subscription lets you plan the next weeks of meals with our smarter weekly-generator, as well as create grocery lists and send your grocery list to Instacart for delivery. All for just $5/month!
For free:
- Customize the generator with your nutrition targets, budget, and cook times
- Follow any kind of diet you like, customize your food tastes
- Track your intake. Search for what you ate and add it to the plan
- Create unlimited custom recipes and custom foods
- Save favorites, set recurring foods, and rate foods with thumbs up/down to improve your suggestions
Premium:
- Automatically generate your next week's meal plan, receive it with an email
- Instant grocery lists for your meal plan
- Export your grocery list to Instacart for delivery
- Automatic pantry tracking to reduce waste
- Automatic leftovers meal planning
- Print/email meal plans
- Save an unlimited number of meal plans
- The Family-scale setting will impact the number of ingredients in your grocery list
Carb cycling is when you vary the amount of carbs you intake on a day-to-day basis, usually to get more carbs on your workout days and fewer carbs on your rest days. The specific cycle is up to you, but as long as you can fit the whole cycle into a week, you can set it up with Eat This Much.
The main screen you'll want to look at is the Weekly Planner page - you can find by clicking Edit Week in the top right:
Lets take a look at this example weekly planner layout:
Each day can be set up with a custom set of nutrition targets. Here we just use two different nutrition profiles, "Rest day" and "Workout day", but you can set up a custom one for every day of the week if you choose.
In a very basic carb cycling program, I would probably set a high carb target on my workout days, and a low carb target on my rest days. Once you have the layout set up the way you want it, hit "Apply changes", then go back to the diet planner page and hit the button that says "Regenerate week...", and select the weeks you want to regenerate. Once you regenerate the week, the plans will be updated to match your new weekly layout.
If you're trying to bulk up, you might be looking for meal plans in the 2500 to 3000 calorie range (for example). When you ask the planner for really high calorie meals, it can often double up on servings of things that, realistically, might be pretty hard to eat a lot of.
How can we make the meals easier to eat? The best thing thing to do is add something that's high calories that you can keep down easily as a recurring food. For example, I add one or two cups of whole milk to each of my meals and set them to recur "always". This adds a lot of calories to my meals and makes me much less likely to feel overstuffed.
I also have a pretty hearty post-workout shake that has about 1000 calories and a ton of protein. I set this to recur "always" in my post workout meal, and because it fills up a significant proportion of my nutrition requirements for the day, the rest of my automatically generated meals are much more manageable (and more flexible). To make this work best, create a new meal type specifically for that post-workout shake, and then set the meal to "only use recurring foods". Otherwise, it might add other dishes to the meal that you don't want.
Recurring foods also work well for low calorie meal plans, but you probably won't be using them for the purpose of feeling less overstuffed (which can be a real problem for many people who have a hard time gaining weight). Most people tend to eat similar things for certain meals on a day to day basis, and the idea behind recurring foods is to let you tell the planner about those things. The less you have to stretch your habits to follow a meal plan, the more likely you are to stick to it.
We don't tell you how much water to drink in the plans, but here's a good guideline:
"The Institute of Medicine determined that an adequate intake (AI) for men is roughly 3 liters (about 13 cups) of total beverages a day. The AI for women is 2.2 liters (about 9 cups) of total beverages a day."
That's a pretty decent amount of water, so you'll probably want to be drinking constantly throughout the day. If you do it in just 5 sittings (maybe 3 meals and 2 snacks), a male should drink about 2.5 cups of water each sitting, and a female, about 2 cups each sitting.
Personally, I just keep one of these next to me all day: a thermos hydration water bottle and then take gulps from it whenever I feel like it. It's probably the best water bottle I've ever used (I tried maybe 8 of them before I stuck with this one), and it has a nifty counter on it so you can keep track of how many times you've refilled it and make sure you're meeting your goal.
Source: http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/water/art-20044256
If you have a gluten intolerance or a food allergy, you can change the food filters to match. On the meal planner page, click the Settings link in the sidebar to head to the generator's settings page. Then go to the "food filters" section and check off any foods that you might have an allergy to, or just plain don't want to see. There is a "Gluten" allergy button that will filter out any ingredients that have gluten in them.
If you notice any specific recipes getting through your filters that shouldn't be, please feel free to send us an email at support@eatthismuch.com - there's also a "report recipe" button on recipes to let us know that something is showing up that shouldn't be.
You can quickly duplicate meal plans in your calendar with our save/load features. As a Premium subscriber, you can save an load weeks of plans a time to quickly get a plan that you already know you like.
Maybe you made a handful of changes to your settings and want to rebuild the whole weekly meal plan at once. Or maybe you just really hated the meal plan. You can rebuild the whole week by clicking "Regenerate entire week" at the top of the planner page (this is a premium-only feature).
The planner takes about 20 seconds to run, and will clear the existing meal plans on whatever date range you select. So before you do this, maybe go through the meal plan you started with and thumbs up/down any foods you do or don't like, and set things that you really like to reacur often in specific meals. Then have it start generating.
If you'd like to permanently delete your account, you can do so via the website. Here are the instructions:
1. If you have subscribed through the mobile apps, make sure you cancel your subscription before deleting your account. (Here are instructions for that: http://help.eatthismuch.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-do-i-unsubscribe )
2. Click your username in the sidebar.
3. Click "Membership status"
4. Click "Delete your account". Then confirm your request by clicking the checkbox, and it's done!
All of our generic foods are from the USDA food database. It's not incredibly extensive, but it is fairly reputable. Other foods are user submitted and have been checked against multiple sources, but it's still a good idea to double check nutrition labels as you eat things in case there's an error. Do you have a suggestion for another database to add? Let us know via email
Here is a quick getting-started guide to Eat This Much for Professionals. ETM Pro is still a work in progress, and if you have any feedback or questions, please send us an email telling us what you're looking for from the service.
Once you sign up for Eat This Much Pro, you'll be directed to your Diet Planner page. This is the core of the Eat This Much platform, and all of your clients (that have full-access accounts) will have access to a similar planner. With your Pro account, however, you now have an extra menu bar across the top of the page.
This is where your planner now lives. If you used the site before upgrading to Pro, all of the normal navigation is now under this tab. You'll be able to make meal plans in here, save them, then apply them to your clients' accounts.
Here you can do 2 things:
1. Apply sets of meal plans to your clients' diet planners. On your own diet planner, you can save good meal plans to reuse, and then apply them to to the client accounts.
2. Directly view/edit your clients' accounts. If you want to make edits directly to a client's planner, or help them with something else in their account, click the "Actions" button next to their name.
Here you can send any of your meal plans to any number of your clients all at once. Before you send a plan, you can edit it however you like, down to the exact text for each recipe.
Here you can view your saved meal plans, and view/edit them, or get a link to share it with other people.
Here you can invite clients to create an ETM account, as well as add "Email-only" clients.
Edit your full name, company name, and custom logo. Your custom logo and name will be shown to your clients on their accounts, as well is in the meal plan emails that you send out. You can also manage your billing info here.
Full-access clients have a full ETM account that they can use to plan their meals. You can apply your meal plan sets to their planners, and they can make substitutions, manage their grocery list / pantry, and send emails to themselves.
Email-only clients are just that - they simply exist in your client dashboard, and you can send them emails of your saved meal plan sets (or meal plans directly from your own planner).
The first thing you'll want to do is invite your clients (Full-access accounts need invites, but Email-only clients don't and can start receiving your meal plans right away). Your clients will receive an invite email with a link, and once they click the link, they'll be able to start setting up their profile. Alternatively, you can create your client's accounts for them, and they will receive an email with a temporary password to log in.
Full access clients: Once these clients are set up, they can either use the site entirely on their own, or you can get involved as much as you like. You can go in and edit their accounts directly, or send your own sets meal plans to their diet calendar (both via the Edit user plans tab).
Creating your meal plans happens in the Planner Sandbox tab. Create them just like you would plans for yourself, and then when you're happy with them, save them. Click the "Diet Actions" button in the top left of a meal plan, then "Save plans". Select the dates for all the plans you would like to save to a set (up to 31 per set), and then give them a title. Once you save them, you can load them into any other dates on your own planner, or apply them to any of your clients' accounts.
If you want to create meal plan sets for many different calorie levels (e.g. if you group clients into 1500 Cals, 1800 Cals, 3000 Cals, etc.), you should most likely create different Nutrition Profiles for each group. When you copy the meal plan sets to your client accounts, the Nutrition Profiles get copied over as well. If you edit the same nutrition profile to create each group of plans, when you copy it to your client accounts,
Once you've made some plans you're happy with, head to the "Manage client plans" tab. Here, you can apply your saved plans to your clients' diet planners. Once you do, you'll see the dates for which the plans are applied, and you'll get an email notification when your client is about to finish your meal plans (at which point they can simply use the site themselves, or email you to give them some new plans).
If you'd rather do the work of putting together meal plans and sending them to your clients, you can do so in the "Send plan emails" tab. Here you can send emails of meal plans from your saved plans or directly from your Planner Sandbox's calendar.
The main benefit of sending from the "Send plan emails" tab is that you can totally customize the content of the email with our built in editor. You can write in acceptable substitutes, add extra images, or whatever.
Viewing client adherence, progress graphs, sharing saved recipes, food lists, and more! If you have any feature requests, please send us an email at support@eatthismuch.com