Your profile affects a fair amount of your site experience. Long story short: the more accurately your profile is filled out, the better your experience of the site will be. Here's a quick run-down of each setting and how it affects your usage of the site.

This shows up in two places:

• If you post a recipe, it's in the recipe header.
• It's in your public profile. Here's a public profile to show you what's made public in each profile.

This will localize your calendar and your shopping list. What this means is that, the idea of "the current time" isn't necessarily the same for your phone or computer and for the foodious.com servers.

Long story short, the best way to for foodious to know your local time is to ask. Once you set your timezone, you'll see your local time posted at the top of your calendar and your shopping list.

If you're on mobile and you shake your phone (or you click the "Suggest Recipes" button at the top of your calendar), foodious will run a query against every recipe and assign a score to each one. The score depends on your profile settings.

This setting bumps the score up for a given recipe if that recipe is in line with this goal. E.g.: if you've chosen Vegan and a given recipe is vegan, it's score is increased.

The set of recipes that are presented when you shake your phone will be in descending order of score, so you're more likely to see recipes that meet your diet/nutritional goals.

Only the top 25 recipe scores are presented as suggestions.

The nutritional charts that are on the calendar page (on mobile, you have to click the "View Charts" button at the top of your calendar in order to see these) are all "As a Percentage of RDA".

Your gender setting is used to compute RDA for you, so the nutritional charts reflect you and your goals.

This works the same as "Gender". In order to compute RDA, foodious needs your target daily calorie intake. This, along with gender, allows the nutritional charts presented on the site to accurately reflect your goals.

These are not currently used, but soon they will work as follows:

Similar to how "One Word.." above is used, if a recipe is high in sodium, and you've indicated that sodium is a top nutritional concern, this recipe will have it's score lowered.

foodious only shows the recipes with the top 25 scores, so recipes that match on your top nutritional concerns will be much less likely to make it into the final list.

Similar to how "One Word.." above is used, if a given recipe contains one of these ingredients, it's score is increased, making it likelier for the recipe to make it into the top 25 list.

Similar to how "One Word.." above is used, if a given recipe contains one of these ingredients, it's score is lowered, making it less likely for the recipe to make it into the top 25 list.

Similar to how "One Word.." above is used, if a given recipe has an allergy contains one of these ingredients, the recipe is removed entirely from the results.

This affects your shopping list default settings.

The shopping list will scale ingredient amounts on the list to match how many people you're cooking for. This control will default to whatever value you choose here when you click into your shopping list.

Similar to how "One Word.." above is used, if this is checked, and a given recipe is marked as "Kid Friendly", it's score is increased, making it likelier for the recipe to make it into the top 25 list.

Currently unused. I'd like to eventually use this to recommend local grocery stores, e.g.: if you need a particular ingredient, and a store near you has it on sale.

This controls where "phone shake" is enabled. If "Entire Site" is checked, no matter where you are on the site, you can shake your phone and get a list of suggested recipes. If "Calendar Only" is checked, phone shake is only enabled on the calendar page.

(NOTE: This applies to mobile only)

This controls which recipes are selected when you shake your phone or click the "Suggest Recipes" button.

If you've checked "All Recipes", foodious will score every recipe on the site.

If "My Faves" is checked, only the recipes you've liked will be scored.

(NOTE: This applies to both mobile and non-mobile)

This controls which types of meals are selected when you shake your phone or click the "Suggest Recipes" button.

If you've only checked "dinner" and "lunch" here and you shake your phone, foodious will only score, and present, recipes that are for dinner and/or lunch.

(NOTE: This applies to both mobile and non-mobile)