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Meal slots and servings

Choose which meals to fill, see how your calories are split across them, and learn how servings scale each dish.

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A day is made of meal slots. VitalPlate plans four kinds — breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack — and you decide which ones it fills.

Choosing your slots

By default all four slots are enabled. Turn off any you don’t want — for example, skip the snack, or plan dinners only. Beverages, condiments, and individual components are never planned as meals; a slot always holds a real dish.

How calories are split

Your daily calorie target is divided across the slots you enable. Each slot has a default share:

SlotShare of the day
Breakfast25%
Lunch30%
Dinner35%
Snack10%
These shares are normalized over the slots you turn on. If you disable a slot, its share is spread across the rest so the day still adds up to your full target.

Servings (×N)

Once a slot has a calorie share, VitalPlate scales the chosen dish to hit it. Each meal is set to a whole number of servings between 1 and 3 — shown as ×1, ×2, or ×3 — picking whichever lands closest to that slot’s calorie target.

  • Servings are always whole — you won’t get a ×1.5.
  • The planner never goes above ×3 for a single meal.
  • When two serving counts are equally close to the target, it prefers the smaller one.

Where your calorie target comes from in the first place is covered in How your calorie target is calculated.

More in Meal planning

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