Notion Nutrition: Elevate Your Meal Prep Game with a Personalized Food Database

I recently decided to focus on improving my diet, and a huge part of that is preparing healthy food. When it comes time to plan meals for the week, rather than trying to rely on my terrible memory to come up with meal ideas, I can quickly reference my database and get a grocery list together within just a few minutes.

Your Favorite Meals at your Fingertips

Here's what the database looks like:

I'll be honest, I don't love to spend a ton of time in the kitchen cooking and cleaning. There are many other activities I'd rather be doing instead, so I love to batch my meal prep and prep many meals at once that I can eat later. I also love to take advantage of nutritious foods that come ready-to-eat like Costco's chicken nuggets (they're life-changing).

Properties

Let's walk through the different properties in the Foods database:

P Score

This is a simple metric I use to guage how protein-dense a food is. Here is the formula:

P Score = (Protein) / (Calories / 4)

Protein and Calories are per-serving with Protein measured in grams

Because one gram of protein has about 4 calories of energy, a food where 100% of the calories come from protein should have a P Score of 1.

As an example, I want to eat 160 grams of protein per day and a maximum of 2300 calories. Plugging those values into the formula, I get 160 / (2300 / 4) = 0.28. This means that any foods with a P Score higher than 0.28 will put me on track for hitting my protein target for the day and any foods with a lower P Score will require me to eat lean protein sources to cover the gap at some other point during the day.

Kitchen Tools

This property is a relation to another database I keep on the same page.

is allows me to maintain a many-to-many relationship between my favorite appliences and the recipes that make use of them. Why is this useful? If I want to see all of the recipes I have that use my Slow Cooker, I can simply view the Slow Cooker entry in my Kitchen Tools database and see all recipes that reference Slow Cooker. Although I don't use it super heavily right now, it leaves the door open to extension down the road.

Ingredients

This is a self-referencing relation. Currently, I catagorize entries in the Food database into two different groups: Recipe or Food. Recipes are foods that are composed of other foods. I do not add all recipe ingredients to the Foods DB instead, I only add ingredients that in and of themselves are consumable foods I would eat.

Storage

This column is a select property that indicates what storage method the food is suitable for. I try to keep my freezer stocked with healthy meals that can be easily reheated in the microwave.

URL

I use this property to link to the source of the recipe if I found it online. I mostly use it for video links, because I prefer to copy written recipe instructions directly into the database entry page.

Conclusion

And that's what I have so far! I would love to hear your ideas on how you would improve this database.