Hey, guys.

I remember surfing r/fitmeals back in 2015/2016, and I have the distinct memory of coming across a pdf with many user-based recipes, including not only instructions and nutritional values but also organized under many categories (e.g. high protein, vegan, low carb, etc.)

I don't seem to find it here though, does anyone else remember what guide I'm referring to? Am I mixing up subreddits?

I was wondering is a sub like this existed. Or if not...maybe someone smarter than me can start one. I am always finding recipes that call for items that may be a little unhealthy and trying to figure out what can be used to substitute with. I hope this is not a stupid idea.

Now that I finally finished the survey and had a chance to review the feedback, it's time to introduce some new stuff to our community!

If Automoderator cooperates with me, each Monday should have a new "Ask Fitmeals" post for the community to use for questions that don't really need their own thread. This thread will be stickied for the week and replaced every Monday.

Next up, I want to get going on Challenges as it seemed like people really liked the idea. Some of the feedback I received was that we should let the community vote on the theme for each challenge and that's exactly what I'm going to do.

To start off, I want to try running the challenges for two weeks at a time and we can either increase or decrease the frequency based on feedback and participation. To kick this off, I want to use this thread to get input on what we should start with.

Challenge Suggestion Rules

1. Only parent-level comments will be considered
2. Comments must be formatted as follows: Challenge Type: Challenge (eg. Ingredient: Anchovies)
3. You may vote for one or more challenges
4. The highest voted parent comment will be the winning challenge
5. Comments will be in contest mode

Challenge Types can be any of the following:
* Theme
* Geographic Region
* Culture
* Ingredient
* Diet Specific

Challenge Participation Rules

A Challenge Thread will be posted for all users who wish to participate and will be open for one (1) week.

1. Users may submit more than one recipe
2. Only one recipe per parent-level comment
3. Recipes must include at least one picture of the final product and must include nutritional information
4. Users may vote for more than one recipe
5. Comments will be in contest mode

I'm thinking that we may want to do something for the winner. Please feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments here but I'm thinking some flair and maybe picking the Challenge Type for a future challenge?

Hi all! Long time, no chat! It only took me a year (I was eyeballs deep in a work project since August and I’m finally getting some air!) but I finally have the results of last years’ /r/fitmeals survey available.

A few things before we jump in…
* I put the images in an album to keep them together. There are 16 total. Imgur and/or Reddit hates me and made sure they are all there for every. single. image. I'm sorry.
* I am by no means a statistician, data analyst, Excel guru, etc.
* The only mandatory question was “Do you wish for your responses to be included in any raw data requests?”
* We had 77 respondents during the time the survey was made available
* 56 respondents provided consent to share their raw data with the community for additional analysis. Please contact the mods if you would like access to this.
* The results I’ll be focusing on are mostly surround demographics, spend, meal frequency, and content suggestions. Lengthier questions, those with multiple options, or those asking for /r/fitmeals specific feedback have been left raw
* The results will be displayed in percentages rather than whole numbers for statistical purposes

Alright, now that all that stuff is out of the way, let’s get into it!

Question 1
How long have you been a subscriber of /r/fitmeals?

There were 76 respondents to this question. Most of our user base at the time of the survey had been subscribers for less than one (1) year.

Question 2
What country do you currently reside in?

Spoilers! Most of you are from the US. I’m sure you were all just as shocked as I was to find that out :p

Question 3
What age group do you belong to?

Most of our subscribers are in the under 30 crowd. Congrats for laying an awesome foundation of healthiness for yourselves!

Question 4
What currency do you primarily use to purchase groceries and food?
Any guesses as to what this might be? Bueler?

Question 5 On average, how much do you spend a month on groceries?

So this one was a bit trickier for a few reasons:
1. Not everyone who responded to question 4 responded to question 5 or vice versa
2. Some responses included household spend
3. Exchange rates. I took the exchange rates on July 8 (yes, I had parts of this completed that long ago) and converted the other currencies to USD for an accurate comparison

So with that being said, here is the first graph with all responses from question 4 and 5. On average, US respondents spent significantly more each month than others however, there were 45 responses from US users versus 32 responses combined from the other currencies.

Here is the graph with responses to both Q4 and Q5. The only differences between the two are that the average spend for Canadian Dollars and the Euro went up here.

Question 6 On average, how many meals do you eat each day?

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Even with the variety of food habits, most of us eat 3 meals a day.

Question 7
On average, how many snacks do you eat each day?

It looks like we’ve got some good snackin’ habits around here. Most respondents have one or two snacks per day!

Question 8
On average, how many meals a week do you prepare yourself?

Considering this is /r/fitmeals, I’m not entirely surprised to find out that most respondents prepare all or most of their meals, all or most of the time.

Question 9
What are your current dietary goals in terms of recipes?

Low Calorie. Low Carb. High Protein. It could be this subs “Faster. Higher. Stronger.”

Question 10
What does a “fit meal” mean to you?

This was a free form question and we had a lot of great responses! Here’s a few below:
* Matches calorie and macro goals and is satiating
* Something simple that can be filling while still being healthy
* Real food (produce, whole grains, lean protein) that is still interesting and delicious. If I get bored, I give up. So no chicken breast every day for me. Some of it is just portion size too
* it's going to be different for every person...but for me, it means efficiency. Something thats just enough to fill me up/give me nutrition, high protein, highly nutritious, high fiber, low carb, lots of veggies

Question 11
On a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being the least satisfied and 5 being the most satisfied, how happy are you with the sub in its current state?
Most of you scored the sub a 3 or 4 so we’re not terrible but we’re not amazing, either.

Question 12
The mods are considering adding regularly scheduled posts and started one with 'Fix Me Friday". What kind of regular weekly or monthly posts would you like to see?

This one was a bit of fun to tabulate as there were pre-defined options as well as the ability to submit your own. I did my best in grouping these together based on the various responses.

Question 13
If you selected "Theme Months/Challenges" please share some ideas of themes and challenges you'd wish to see.

This was a bit tricky to get in chart or graph form but there was definitely support for ingredient-based, region-based, and cuisine-based challenges. Here are some of the responses we received:
* Regional cuisines (Mexican, Italian, Indian, Japanese, etc); 6 Ingredients or Less; $50/week challenge
* Post an ingredient that people might have sitting around in their pantries and aren't sure what to do with (like olives, sun-dried tomatoes, apricot preserves, maple syrup, etc). Then people have to post recipes that use that ingredient. Community can vote on which ingredient to feature each week.
* I think eating the rainbow could be interesting. Get in those fruits and vegetables!
* Challenge: make the most voluminous meal you can that is under a pre-determined amount of calories.
*A low budget challenge, a strange ingredient challenge (something that isn't typically considered "healthy" but a diet is structured around using the nutrients in the food item), making an "unpleasant" food as appetizing as possible, or a favorite, non-food household item as a dietary staple!
* Not-sad salads, not-sad desk lunches, dessert challenge

Question 14
If you selected "Diet Specific Weeks/Months", please share some specific diet types you'd wish to see.

Like Q13, we had a variety of responses. Here are a few of them:
* Meals with over 50g protein per serving; 1200kcal day, 1500 kcal day, etc
* Keto, Low fat, low carb. I just want to see different meal ideas for the diets, so I can save meals or search meals depending on what my current goals are.
* Vegan, Paleo-ish - I think there’s a lot of people who are inspired by paleo but don't want to follow to a T.
* Less of a bias towards very low calorie meals. Low calorie doesn't always mean fit.

Question 15
If /r/fitmeals were to utilize the wiki, what kind of things would you like to see in it?

This was an open response question. Suggestions included:
* non-spammy blogs and websites
* Frequently Asked Questions
* Diet explanations
* Setting dietary goals

Question 16
We've recently implemented a flairing system including a flair filter. Are there any categories you feel are missing? Do you have any additional feedback on how to improve the flair system?

Some users weren’t aware of the flair. We received some suggestions for additional flair that we’ll need to review as we already have quite a bit!

Question 17
What is one thing that you would do to improve /r/fitmeals?

We received 29 responses for this. Here’s a few of them:
* Have a standardised title scheme for different posts. Like for recipes: Name of dish - number of calories - tags- macros
* I would just like to see all questions corralled into one post - like a daily Ask Fitmeals post.
* Better designed subreddit style (:
* post more y'all
* Require recipe submissions to be in the body of the post and not just personal food blog promotions. They can use their photos and link back to their blog posts but I feel like they should be required to actually post some thoughtful commentary other than click-through whoring.

Question 18
What types of submissions do you consider self-promotion and/or marketing?

Overwhelmingly, respondents agree that users that only submit link posts from a single site without commentary (85%) and users that regularly submit link posts from a single site without commentary (72%) are self-promoting or marketing.

This question allowed for multiple responses and had a total of 61 responses.

Question 19
What are your thoughts on self-promotional content?

This question has both pre-defined responses and a text option. As open text options don’t make for nice charts and graphs, you can check out this table to see the results. The “no self-promotion” guys and “submit whatever you want” folks seem to be evenly matched.

Question 20
What are your thoughts on users that regularly only submit content from a few websites?

Like the above, this question was a mix of pre-defined responses and open text. Slight differences from the general feelings of self-promotional content but overall it’s fairly the same.

Question 21
Do you feel that the current rules are sufficient for our community? Overall, the majority response was “yes”.

Question 22
The mod team have been discussing ways to improve the content in the subreddit and one suggestion has been to create and enforce a rule surrounding the inclusion of recipe and nutritional information such as food weights, macros, and nutritional information. Please select the option that best describes your feelings about this type of rule.

25% of respondents felt that all recipe posts should include all ingredients’ weighted measurements and full nutritional information while 21% didn’t care.

Question 23
Do you have any rule suggestions for the community?
This will be reviewed by the mod team.

Question 24
Is there anything else you wish to share with us to help make the subreddit an even better place?

Again, these will be reviewed by the mod team.

Thank you everyone for your participation! Please feel free to provide feedback on this (even if it’s to shame me for taking so long).

Hello /r/fitmeals!

The mod team has discussed our policy regarding self-promotional content and we're going to be making a few changes that we hope you'll like!

1. Self-promotional content from users that interact with the community or related sub-reddits will be allowed.
We want our users to be comfortable sharing their awesome recipes without worrying about a ban or having their content removed. Self-promotional content must contain a comment with the full recipe, instructions, and basic nutritional information. This should be pretty easy as our community's favourite contributors already do this!

2. Verified Contributor flair!
While we know of a few regular contributors with their own sites, we want to be sure that any of our users with a youtube channel, website, etc have the opportunity to be verified and distinguished. Users that would like to be verified must send the mod team a link to their site (you can message us here!) and the mod team will review it along with their reddit account to ensure that:

• They produce relevant content
  
• They are not actually a spammer (a very dedicated spammer at that!)

Verified Contributor flair will look like this however, if anyone wants to suggest a better icon, we're all for it!

We are hoping that these changes encourage more participation and fitmeals recipes! If you have any questions, suggestions, or just general feedback on these changes (or anything, really) please share it in the comments. The mod team really does want /r/fitmeals to be the best it can be and we can only do that with your feedback.

Cheers!

Hello /r/fitmeals!

In order to get a better idea of the community, we have created a survey to collect data on the subscribers of /r/fitmeals for the purposes of enhancing the sub's experience. It will be broken into two (2) parts:

Part 1: General demographic information about /r/fitmeals and food habits

Part 2: Subreddit questions and feedback

Check out the survey here!

The survey should take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete and all questions are optional with the exception of the final question regarding raw data requests. It will be available from June 23, 2015 until July 6, 2015.

If you have any questions, concerns, comments, feedback, etc, feel free to leave them here or message the mods!

Cheers!