My girlfriend and I are embarking on a quest for improving our eating and excersize habits. We’re lazy, always “on the go”, and have 1.5 hour daily commutes (round trip).
So today I signed up for ediets.com (Mayo Clinic Plan), only to be quite dissappointed.
First of all, it costs $11.95/month for the most basic plan, and if you cancel prior to the 3rd monthly payment, you have to pay a $25 “early termination” fee. Bastards.
Secondly, you can’t configure it to automatically double the portions/shopping list for 2 people. Yes, I know they are wanting me to put in my individual information and weightloss goals so that they can customize a menu for me, but I do not live in a vacuum…I live with a girlfriend who might want to eat too. We shop and cook together. I should be able to check a box somewhere and not have to tediously double every damn portion manually.
Thricely, you have no control over food preferences. My girlfriend doesn’t like fish, and is allergic to shellfish, but there is no way to configure the system to replace all fish recipes with another chicken/beef/pork recipe. They have a “substitutions” chart, where you can select individual items that you’d like to replace with something else, but that doesn’t really work well for whole recipes. You can’t always easily just use some different kind of meat with a fish recipe. You need a whole different recipe. If I’m paying for a service, I shouldn’t have to come up with my own fish alternative recipies 3 times a week.
In the fourth place, the weekly shopping list is made pretty much worthless as it is written in tbps and cups, and had me buying things like 2 small potatoes and 1 medium potato, 12 tbps of avocado, 2 cups of cooked peas, 2 large celery stalks.
How about some weights and measures that are actually functional in a grocery store environment? The meats and dairy products were sometimes in ounces, I will at least give them credit for that.
So…are there any decent online diet/nutrition planning sites where we might hope to find a superior experience?