Tonight I'm putting together a soup so I had to use the "Build a Food or Meal" button on the BodyBugg website.  At first it looked promising as this is one feature of The Perfect Diet Tracker that could be improved upon.  Then I attempted to use it.  The pluses are:

• Allows you to enter an actual serving number
• It is saved in your database for future use
  

The minuses?  Well, let's see:

• If the ingredient you are "searching for" doesn't exist, then it says "no matches, add custom food below".  That's great but when you look "below" there is no where to add a custom food.  So I had to close that window, go back to the place where you enter food in general (which I've already mentioned isn't user friendly) and go through that whole process in another couple of windows.  Then you can go back and attempt to build a meal again.  My suggestion is to stay in that food entry window until you've checked to make sure all of your ingredients are in the database (which they won't be) before trying to "build a meal".  When you do add custom ingredients or foods, it doesn't give you the option of saving it to your database without adding it to your food log.  So, I had to add all of my ingredients to my dinner log, then go "build a meal" which they also add to the dinner log by default, then go into the dinner log and delete all of the individual ingredients from said log.  Ugh!
• The other minus is that while you're building this meal, you can see a "total" calorie count for the entire recipe but not per serving.  So you might be staring at a number like 1246 and not know how many calories you'll be eating of that (unless you rock at doing math in your head) until it gets added to the log.  The drawback to this is if you're wanting to alter the meal to make it more calorie friendly you'd have to keep saving (which adds it to your log automatically every time) before you could see the calories per serving.  If they think people don't do this, think again!  I did this all the time when building recipes in WW eTools.

Oh and I wanted to see if the tab/highlight thing was just a Firefox thing so I openned IE and got the exact same thing.  Not a browser issue, it's a Web Developement issue.  Here's a screenshot of the "Build a food or meal" window:

 

Notice the word "Dinner" at the top.  If you've already entered the other meals for the day, you have no choice but to enter something into "Dinner" unless you click on "I skipped this meal" then it will take you to "Late Snack".  That big green "Calories Consumed" button on the main page takes you to the last meal you didn't enter, in order.  You MUST enter your foods in the correct "meal order" apparently.  The only exception is another link further down on the main page intended for "report" type stuff where you can list everything you ate by meal in one place.  IF you've entered something into a meal category then you can "edit" that category from there; However, if there isn't anything entered then no "edit" option appears.  Kind of makes me want to go through and enter "baby carrots" into every meal category at the start of the day just so I can go into whatever category I want to enter what I ate.

Now that I've said so much negative about the food tracker, there is something I do like.  If you're in a meal category, like "Lunch" for instance, it lists foods you've recently eaten in a window on the left.  Better than that is that it keeps the serving size you used then too.  So, with one click you can add it to the day without any further hassle.  This is great for things you tend to eat often and at the same time of day... mostly snacks in my case.

Well, it's time to get that soup on, and maybe I'll burn some calories in the process :)