Creating and Managing Recipes in the Client Portal

In this article:

• Before You Begin
• Creating a Recipe
  • Creating a Recipe While Logging an Entry
• Editing or Deleting a Recipe
• Using a Recipe to Log an Entry

Before You Begin

A few things about recipes work a little differently than you might expect, so it's worth knowing them before you start.

• When logging a Journal entry, My Recipes and Shared Recipes are two different things. 
  • My Recipes are custom recipes you build yourself in the Nutrition section of your portal, and they're private by default: your practitioner won't see these until you log one in your food journal. 
  • Shared Recipes are recipes or meal plans your practitioner has shared with you through a Protocol or Program, and those are fully visible from the start, including all ingredients. You'll find their shared items under a separate Shared Recipes tab when logging food entries in your Journal. Learn more about Logging a Shared Recipe or Meal Plan Item →

• Creating a recipe under My Recipes doesn't log anything to your Journal by itself. It just saves the recipe for later, the same way adding a favorite would. To turn a saved recipe into a dated entry, you log it separately, covered under Using a Recipe to Log an Entry below. If you'd rather save a brand-new recipe and log it in the same motion, you can also create one directly from within the Journal. See Creating a Recipe While Logging an Entry.
   
• When your practitioner opens the nutrient details on a logged recipe entry, they see the recipe's description and ingredient list, in addition to the nutrition totals.

Creating a Recipe

1. Access My Recipes.
   • On a browser: go to Nutrition > My Recipes at the top of the page. (Depending on your navigation, Nutrition may be under the Resources menu.)
   • On the mobile app: tap the hamburger menu (☰) in the top-left corner, select Nutrition, then tap My Recipes.
      
2. Add a new recipe. Click the Fast Action Button (+) in the bottom-right corner to Add Recipe. This works the same way on browser and mobile.
   
    
3. Fill in the recipe basics. In the Add Recipe pop-up, enter a recipe name, a serving size (the total number of servings the whole recipe makes), and an optional description.
   
    

4. Add your ingredients. Use the Search ingredients text box to find each ingredient in the food database.

   📍 Note: Custom recipes can only pull ingredients from Practice Better's food database. There's no option to add an ingredient that isn't found there, so if a specific item doesn't come up, try a close match or a different way of naming it.

    

5. Set the amount for each ingredient. Select a suggestion, choose a unit of measure from the dropdown (units vary by ingredient, but commonly include cup, fl oz, quart, g, tsp, and tbsp), enter the quantity in the how many servings field, then click Add ingredient.
   
    
6. Repeat for every ingredient in the recipe.
    
7. Save your recipe. Click Save to store it under My Recipes.

💡 Tip: Nutrient values, like calories and macros, calculate automatically from the ingredients you add. There's no way to manually edit or override those totals on a saved recipe; if the numbers need to change, adjust the ingredients or quantities instead.

Creating a Recipe While Logging an Entry

You don't have to leave your Journal to build a new recipe. From the "What did you have?" pop-up, you can create a recipe using the same ingredient search and quantity steps described above. Completing the recipe there does two things at once: it saves the recipe to My Recipes for future use, and it logs the entry to your Journal for that day. This is the faster route when you're logging something new for the first time and know you'll want to reuse it later.

Editing or Deleting a Recipe

Editing a recipe doesn't apply retroactively. Any Journal entries you've already logged using the old version keep the nutrient values that were current at the time.

Deleting a recipe doesn't touch your history either. Any Journal entries that already used it stay exactly as they are; only the recipe itself, and your ability to log it again, goes away.

To Edit or Delete a custom recipe in the client portal:

1. Find your recipe. Go to My Recipes and locate the one you want to change.
    
2. To edit: click Edit, then update the recipe's name, serving size, description, or ingredients. 
   
   • Use the Pencil icon to adjust an ingredient's serving amount.
     
   • Click the 3-line icon to remove an ingredient entirely. 
     
   • Click Save when you're finished.
      
3. To delete a recipe: click the Trash icon next to it on your My Recipes page.
   
   • Click Delete in the confirmation pop-up.
     

⚠️ Important: Deleting a recipe can't be undone.

Using a Recipe to Log an Entry

1. Open your Food & Mood Journal. Click the Fast Action Button and select Log food, or open the Journal from your Daily Journal Summary page.
    

2. Find your recipe. Search for it by name in the text box, or click the My Recipes tab.

   📍 Note: This is different from the Shared Recipes tab. My Recipes shows only the recipes you've created yourself.

    

3. Select your recipe and enter the details: meal time, date and time consumed, and number of servings consumed.
    
4. Save your entry. Click Save to record it in your Journal.

Learn more about Using the Client Portal Food & Mood Journal → 

💡 Tip: You can only log one food or recipe per entry. If you're logging several things back to back, for example, a recipe plus a side dish, click the +1 button next to Save in the food journal log pop-up. It saves what you're logging and immediately opens a new entry, so it feels like logging multiple items at once, even though each one is still its own entry.