For my Slimgenics Friends…

Since Amy and I start­ed doing slim­gen­ics, we have want­ed an easy way to enter our food jour­nal on our phones.

I have tried a few apps:

My Fit­ness­Pal — This app was okay, it does have a web ver­sion, but I did­n’t like that it grouped things by meal type — break­fast, lunch, din­ner, etc.

Live­Strong - Again, grouped things by meal type

Those two apps also were “day” ori­ent­ed, which means, for a third-shifter like me, halfway through my “day” it would roll over to a new day on the phone and I would have to keep going back to add things.

I also tried a PDF form app, that would allow me to use the actu­al Slim­gen­ics form and fill out its fields. But, this too was hard to do on a small iPhone Screen.

I final­ly stum­bled on Tap Forms.

This is an iPhone/iPad data­base app, which lets you cre­ate a cus­tom form, and have “drop down” lists. What I like about this is that I can make it mim­ic the actu­al jour­nal, and have all the required foods in the “drop down” lists. Then I just tap and go.

Also, I can “beam” the form to my wife to use once I had it all set­up. So she did­n’t have to enter in all that dupli­cate data.

It takes about 30 min­utes to enter every­thing (using an iPad with a Key­board Dock.) May take a lit­tle longer using just the on screen keyboard.

Down­load the Tap Forms Man­u­al to under­stand how to cre­ate a form (it’s very sim­ple, but eas­i­er to use their man­u­al to explain.)

But in case that isn’t help­ful, here is what I did:

First, go into Tools and then go to “Edit Pick Lists” and cre­ate your lists (Pro­tein, Veg­eta­bles, Fruits, Starch­es, Fat, Ther­mo-Snacks, etc.

In each Pick list, add your foods

Then, go back to the Forms Screen and Hit the + but­ton, and then Add New Form.

Cre­ate a new Form (Name it, set its category)

Then Start Adding Fields. Some things to note:

For each Group­ing I did Pro­tein 1, Pro­tein 2, Pro­tein 3, etc.) this way I could see what I still had left to eat

For the Date, in the Field Options, I turned on “Set Cur­rent Date” so that when I would start a new record for a day, it would add that date (although you can still change it man­u­al­ly too)

For your food cat­e­gories, under the field options, under Pick Lists, choose the cor­re­spond­ing pick list you cre­at­ed. (The same Pick List can be used for each Pro­tein 1, 2, 3, etc. You don’t have to make mul­ti­ple Pick Lists)

For your Water field, I used a “Rat­ing” sys­tem. Since there are 10 check­box­es on the actu­al form, and my water ball was 2 of those check­box­es, I made the rat­ing have a max­i­mum of 5 stars in the field options. But you could have this set to all 10

For the Milk, Salt, Vita Slims and the BM field, I just made those a checkbox

For the Omega-slims and any oth­er pills, I used a Rat­ing option again, and broke it down by groups (so for Omega Slims, 3 starts, since I take 3 pills at my three meals. But you could mark all 9 stars.

Just play with the form and make sure it works (and makes sense) for you. Any ques­tions, just place a com­ment below!