Hi, as you guessed I am new to alli. 

Many of the meals listed are not what I cook, but I was able to define new recipes and foods.  They only show up on my log, but not in my daily menu plan.  Why do I bother defining food if it isn't going to be listed in my weekly list?  All it says in my list is that I deleted food.

Thanks,

MLadyLight

The items in the meal plan are customized to fit within a certain calorie/fat range per meal, and meet your daily goals. It was created to generate these meals so that you don't have to.

You can still track all of your food in the Nutrition Log. Select "add item" and search for what you entered. It will appear in the defined food/recipe boxes on the results page.

Please help me out!

I want keep track of INGREDIENTS or parts of a meal without having to choose a particular meal TIME (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack) or meal RECIPE (such as "crunchy raspberry roll up with sweetened oatmeal encrusted turkey sausage and canola bechamel sauce.".............)

For example.  I may use a flour tortilla for breakfast, lunch, etc.  I may combine this with a scrambled egg, a bunch of spinach, some avocado, etc. Depends on what's on hand & what I feel like. 

Yet when I try to enter nutrition info (or "define food" or whatever you call it) for a simple tortilla, it seems like the site interface forces all the info into a meal time and on a specific log day (Today).  In other words, I can't figure out how to enter and save my own INGREDIENT information so that, say, for lunch tomorrow I want to use a tortilla, some spinach and half a friggin watermelon or whatever by choosing those *particular* elements. Again, for example: if next week I omit the friggin watermelon, can I just click off "tortilla" and "spinach" etc, when logging my eating?

I sure hope that I'm just confused and not that the online site is so inflexible as it appears.

In the daily nutrition log, items are entered into a particular 'meal time' in order to easily track your fat gram target (your fat gram target is per meal, your calorie goal is per day). If you select "add item", and search for an item such as a tortilla, spinach, or watermelon, they should be in the system already. Simply select the item and the quantity and add it to your log. If your item is not already in the system, you can use the 'define' tool to enter your own nutritional information for any item. Then, when you search for the item it will appear in one of the two lower search results boxes.

 I tried to enter my breakfast items into the nutrition log for the first time (and was a little surprised to see that something as simple as raisin bran was not in the database).  Anyway, I created a new food ---- raisin bran ---- and entered it into my breakfast log. 

I notice that the raisin bran is not included in the "your diet exchange information".

I also added 1 cup of skim milk to my nutrition log which IS in your database and it also is not talled in the "your diet exchange information" as a serving of milk.

Is that right?  I'm not sure how Your Diet Exchange Information is useful to me.