Stanford Planner

[Guest guest]

I'm still a relative newbie at this, but I thought I'd share some helpful hints

for those people just getting started with the Stanford meal planner. It's

actually quite easy to use, but can seem a little awkward at first.

Here's a couple of tips, so you don't make the same mistakes I made:

- You can add all the foods you want to the first tab (FOOD VALUES). Once they

are added there, they will show up in the drop down lists on the menu pages.

Just add the food name, the grams (ie. listed on the nutrition label for a

single serving), the protein, fat, and carbs for that serving size. The

spreadsheet will calculate the pro, fat, and carbs per 100g. We have probably

added 100+ foods, and we've only been at it for 5 weeks. It's easiest just to

add the new foods at the bottom of the list.

- Don't delete entries from the Food Values sheet IF you've already entered some

menu's! This will screw up the menu's you've already created. If you have not

entered any menu's yet, I recommend going through the Food Values sheet and

deleting all the foods you think you'll never use, (and maybe rearranging the

ones that are there so it makes more sense to you). You CAN overwrite entries

on this page, just don't delete a whole line.

- Unless the Stanford planner has recently changed, you can only have 8

ingredients for a meal. That wasn't enough for us, so I added a couple of lines

so that it can now take 10 ingredients. I'd be happy to send it to you (or

anyone else) if you'd like that. You can just import it right into your meal

planner and use it as a template.

- I think there are only 10 blank meals when you start. To get more, just

select a tab, right click and pick " Move or Copy " . Then click the " Create a

copy " checkbox and select where you want the new page to go. To quickly create

many new empty menu's, you can select multiple tabs (by holding down the ctrl

key and clicking the tabs), then follow these same steps. For example, when you

first start using this program, you may want to immediately select the 10 blank

sheets, and copy them so you have 20 blank meals to work from. You'll see that

you will quickly go through those 10.

- For food items that don't have nutrition labels (ie produce, bulk foods,

etc.), I use the USDA Nutrient database. You can use the online version

(http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/), or download it to your machine

(http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/srch/search.htm).

- Let's say you make a big batch of ice cream every weekend and use it

throughout the week. 1) Enter all the ingredients for your recipe in a new meal

sheet. 2) Add 'Ice cream' to the Food Values list (first tab). 3) For grams,

add up the total weight of all your ingredients. 4) Pro, Fat, and carbs will be

found at the bottom of your meal sheet. Add those to the the entry in the food

value list. Now, when you are creating a meal, you can simply select 'Ice

cream' from the drop down list, just like any other food. (you can also use the

MIXTURE tab for this).

-, dad to (2 yrs old, keto kid since 7/04. Nothing yet, but we're

still optimistic!)

P.S. We've begun to write our own piece of software that should make all of

this stuff far easier, as well as features such as being able to e-mail menu's,

keep a history of what menu was used on what day, automatically

increase/decrease calories, etc. The plan is to make it easy to grab from the

USDA list if needed. And, also have the capability to import current menus from

the Stanford and Hopkins planners. The problem is that I spend an awful lot of

time weighing food these days, so I don't enough time to work on this. If we

ever finish this, I'll of course post it to this list.

Re: recipes--jackie--which software?

Hi Jackie,

Just reading the posts and was wondering what software you use. We,

at our dietician's suggestion, are using the Stanford meal planner.

We like the versatility of the software too, but not all the foods or

brands we would like to use are included. . .do you use a different

planner and if so, could you describe how it works? Thanks.

ne, mom to (4 year old keto kid since 7-19-04 and still

seizure free!!) and (18 mos).