JPA Multiple relationships on one field in an entity - jpa

Question

I am a beginner to using JPA 2.0 and databases in general and I was just confused about a few concepts.
So I have a total of 3 tables. One is the UserTable, which contains all the information about my user. It has a primary key field called user_Id. My other two tables are ExercisesTable and FoodIntakeTable, and they each have a foreign key field called user_Id to reference the user_Id in my UserTable. I want a one-to-many relationship from my user_Id table to each of the two tables so I can find pull out exercise information or food information for a user.
Pretty much like this:
FoodIntakeTable <-> UserTable <-> ExercisesTable
I need a bidirectional mapping from UserTable to FoodIntakeTable and also a bidirectional mapping from UserTable to ExercisesTable from the field user_Id.
The problem is, when I try to write my code like this in my Usertable class:
#OneToMany(mappedBy="ExercisesTable.userId")
#OneToMany(mappedBy="FoodIntakeTable.userId")
public long userId;
It's illegal because I can't have two #OneToMany annotations on the same field. I think it's supposed to be legal in a normal relational database and I'm just confused about how you translate this into JPA. I'm very new to the whole concept of databases and entities in general, so any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

In JPA you can directly reference entity objects instead of the ids that they are mapped by. Try something like this:
You should have an entity type for each of your tables, say Exercise for ExercisesTable, FoodIntake for FoodIntakeTable, and User for your UserTable.
Then your User entity is the owning side of the relationships, having one field per relationship like this:
#OneToMany(mappedBy=...)
private List<Exercise> exercises;
#OneToMany(mappedBy=...)
private List<FoodIntake> foodIntakes;