PROJECT
Notion Meal Planner
Project Overview
Making meal plans can be a bit of a pain. You either have to do it yourself or you use a pre-built app that does it in its own particular way. I prefer to control the whole thing myself, and I found a decent way to do this with Notion. In this project, I’ll be walking you through my Notion meal planner system.
Food Database
Firstly, make a new database and call it ‘Food Database’. It’ll be the first of four databases, the final one is the actual meal plan.
Name = the default name column.
Food Type = Select. You can classify your food items by their primary macro nutrient. It’s optional, but I like it.
Protein = Number.
Carbs = Number.
Fat = Number.
Kcals = Formula.
Weight (g) = Number. This the the portion size weight in grams.
Portion (Unit) = Number. This is the portion size in grams or units.
Total Weight = Number.
Link = URL. You can save a link to the food item on the supermarkets website. This is optional.
Price = Number.
Protein Per £ = Formula.
Let’s talk formulas for the columns Kcals and Protein Per £.
There are roughly speaking 4 calories in proteins and carbs, and 9 in fats. This makes a ballpark calculation easier than typing in the calories every time. So, this formula estimates fairly accurately the calories based on the protein, carbs and fats.
This one works out the amount of protein you get per pound (or whatever currency you use). If you’re on a high-protein diet, you don’t want to be spending a lot of money on it, because protein tends to be expensive. The calculation is: take the total weight and divide it by the weight of 100g. This will get you a number which represents how many 100g portions are in the pack. Multiply this by the protein for 100g which gets you how much protein is in the whole pack. Finally, divide this by the price, and that gets you how much protein you get per single unit of currency.
Meal Builder
The meal builder is where you will create meals to be used in the meal database. It uses multiple entrees per meal, so if you didn’t have the meal database referencing this, it’d get messy and hard to navigate.
Name = the default name column.
Food database = a rollup column which references the in food database.
Protein, Carbs, Fat = these are rollup columns which reference the food database. Calculate the sum, it doesn’t matter.
Protein (g), Carbs (g), Fat(g) = these are formula that just reference the corresponding rollup columns. This lets you reference them later.
Quantity = this is a number. It means how many of that portion make up that element of the meal.
For example, I made a meal “Alpen + Protein”. It uses Alpen (1 portion), Whole milk (2 portions) and whey protein (1 portion).
Make an entry per element of that meal and name them the same with numbers at the end as below. You can adjust this later to update your meals.
Meal Database
This database is designed to be the record of all created meals.
Name = the default name column.
meal = a rollup that references the name column of the meal builder. Use this to select all meal elements as below.
Kcal = a formula that does the same calculation as it does above. Code below.
Protein, Carbs, Fat = rollup columns that reference the meal builder database and they sum up the values. This is how the system works, it will add up all of the macro nutrients according to the portion sizes you specified in the meal builder.
Protein (g), Carbs(g), Fat (g) = these formula columns just reference the rollup columns, again, so that we have properties to reference in the final database.
Meal Plan
This is the actual meal plan. It’s used to reference items in the meal database and sum up the macro nutrients.
Name = the default name column.
Meal Database = a rollup referencing the name column of the meal database.
Kcal = a formula that is exactly the same as the ones in the previous tables.
Protein, Carbs, Fat = these are rollup columns that reference and sum the corresponding columns in the meal database.
All you have to do is create a row per meal of the dat, reference a meal in the meal database and it’ll show you the final figures for the calories, protein, carbs and fats.
To complete this, hover over the bottom of the kcals, protein, carbs and fat columns and calculate the sum. That’s your final daily macro nutrients. That’s it! A complete, buildable and dynamic meal planner that can be updated for ingredients, portion sizes and meals very easily.
