Eat This Much – Automatic Meal Planner | Hacker News Reader

Eat This Much – Automatic Meal Planner

eatthismuch.com

483 pointssogen312 comments

I like the idea but it's producing a lot of ... unappealing combos like peanut butter and honey ... sandwich? on ... rye? With a random side of red pepper hummus?

I think what's missing is some graph of compatible ingredients per type of food. Things that generally require some companion (what am I eating that hummus with?) You could generate a pizza via compatibility scores. Same with curries, sandwiches, etc.

And of course hinting at the type of macros one might want. 60% of my diet as fat is probably not a good regular day.

But very compelling. I struggle with meal planning and the state of recipes and meals and the seo gamesmanship makes the whole thing very arduous.

FWIW, Peanut butter and a drizzle of honey on rye is one of my goto sandwiches...

I have peanut butter and honey often, but on a single piece of toast. And not for dinner, typically :)

In Australia at least, peanut butter and honey sandwiches are a thing. The taste is actually not bad, and it is possibly healthier than peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

I'm curious where this is a thing more specifically, never heard of this living in Victoria and Queensland

This was often a food for kids (<10yo) in Utah, USA, and other rocky mountain states.

I've eaten this often, in the Southeast US.

I grew up eating this (and odder combinations) in new england.

me either in WA

Was a thing for me in Queensland!

Very common in rural or frontier USA

It was pretty normal for me in NSW. I used to add sliced banana sometimes as well.

Definitely a thing growing up in central Victoria in the 80s/90s.

There are a lot of things that go great with peanut butter and bread if you are open to it besides jam or honey - cheese, butter(toast), hazelnut spread, fresh fruit like bananas. Running out of groceries and living 20 miles from the nearest store leads one down this path of trying whatever is in the refrigerator/pantry.

Second Aussie checking in. Lived in every capital along the east coast, bar Hobart.

Also swear I've never heard of this in Australia :\ Make of that what you will.

Honey is almost pure sugar. Healthier than white sugar, maybe, but unlikely to be healthier than high-quality jams made from whole fruit.

Jam is basically a 50/50 mixture of whole fruit and white sugar.

That really depends on how it is made. It's not useful to make blanket statements like this when there can be a significant amount of deviation from what you expect to be true without it not being jam anymore.

I think the parent comment was implying that jam can be healthy just because it uses whole fruit as an ingredient. The chemistry behind turning a mixture of fruit and sugar into something called jam is pretty well known - there has to be a certain ratio of sugar for it to "set". Usually this is 1:1.

I wrote my comment because I think that people are shocked when they actually see jam being made at home and how much sugar goes into a batch.

https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/09/22/what-makes-jam-set-t...

I am looking at a whole jar of plum jam made by my grandpa with 0 added sugar.

Then that is not jam...jam is defined as fruit with added sugar to act as a preservative.

The question is what did you granpa use as a preservative? The preservative is going to be the difference between say: jam, marmalade, chutney, etc...

>but unlikely to be healthier than high-quality jams made from whole fruit.

Healthier is a bit of a misnomer here. Honey is nothing but sugar (no micro nutrients or negligible at best), still it is the easiest sugar for humans to process and convert to energy.

"high-quality jams made from whole fruit" is just a giant broad brushstroke, you may as well just broadly say fruit is healthier than honey (as if all fruit is created equally), sure there are some micronutirents in most fruits which you don't get from honey, but most fruits are also going to spike insulin...and coming back to the idea of "high-quality jams made from whole fruit", the reality is most store bought jams will be highly processed (so most of the beneficial fiber and micronutrients will be replaced with refined sugar and/or HFCS).

most store bought jams will be highly processed

Those are the jams I had in mind, specifically to exclude, when I used the qualifier “high-quality.” In a similar fashion, I would not consider Wonderbread to be “high-quality” bread.

Admittedly, it’s a bit of a weasel word, but I think it’s still important to recognize that jam can be healthier than honey. Homemade jam made from whole, ripe strawberries will have fibre, vitamins, and essential minerals like potassium, whereas honey does not.

>it’s a bit of a weasel word, but I think it’s still important to recognize that jam can be healthier than honey.

I agree with your points on vitamins/minerals (like I said above, jams will have micro-nutrients which the honey does not).

So its pros and cons not healthy/healthier...the person who obtains their micro-nutrients elsewhere doesn't need them from jam and probably better off getting the sugar/calories from honey over the fruit jam. Again the honey is just more easily converted into energy and generally will cause less of an insulin spike than sugar from jam.

So whats healthy/healthier often depends on purpose or needs...are you eating the jam/honey for energy only? Honey is better. Are you eating it to as your source of those certain vitamins/minerals? Obviously honey is void of those, so jam. That said no one eats Jam for the vitamin/mineral or fiber content, there are just better sources. Then again you may get some great anti-oxidants from various jams made from berries specifically (of course you would get the same from the berries themselves without the added sugar in jam).

Getting more into the weeds of "health", many people will "use" honey for coughs, sore throats, etc... because its anti-bacterial properties and use local honey as an anti-allergen (exposure to small dose of local pollen) all to great effect.

Can confirm PB&H is a thing in Aus - however peanutbutter and Vegimite is where it's at

Hahaha, of course I know I’m not alone, but honestly didn’t think I’d see someone here saying that!

Peanut butter and Vegimite, and lots of butter.

I'm so trying this with Marmite when i get back home.

Marmite sell this pre-made.

https://www.marmite.co.uk/products/marmite-crunchy-peanut-bu...

Ah, I kinda forget when it’s not in the house, but randomly remember just now.

Try using meso instead of vegimite / marmite.

Pairings have been tough for us to get right. Your nutrition targets and meal/food filters have the biggest impact on what foods show up together, and then we have some weightings that influence pairings, but relatively minor.

It's also tricky because while some people balk at certain food pairings, others think they're perfectly fine. Our main approach has been to just try to make it easy to swap things out if you don't like a suggestion (on the logged-in planner, you can tell a meal to give you a big list of alternatives to skim through instead of refreshing one at a time).

One thing to try is bumping up the allowed complexity of a meal. Click the 3-dot menu next to the meal's name, edit the settings, and bump it up from Simple to Moderate. Then regenerate the meal to see if you get more appealing results.

Any sort of feedback mechanism / collaborative filtering in place? Seems a good spot for data collection upon reroll to develop better recommendations

No, that will just lead to useless feedback like you saying something delicious is unappealing.

I was told to eat a serving of almond butter and some almonds as my lunch. Maybe flag some things as 'snacks' and try and pair a meal item like a sandwich with a snack item like 8 almonds.

For what it's worth, that pairing sounds fine to me.

I'm pretty sure that's a recipe on the site rather than a random combination. You can alter what recipes it will offer you.

peanut butter on honey is good, better than jelly or jam.

I make pancakes, from oats and cream cheese, with peanut butter and honey (or maple syrup) on top. I'm sorry.

Pancakes from oats & cream cheese sounds interesting - what's the ratio of ingredients?

About 1/1.

1dl oats, blend them first 1dl cream cheese 2 eggs 1dl (almond) milk (because I like them thinner) 1tbsp butter 1tsp cinnamon 1tsp baking powder

My version of something like this one: https://www.tasteefulrecipes.com/cream-cheese-oatmeal-pancak...

Counterpoint: peanut butter and honey sandwich is delicious, and a worthy competitor to the king of childhood sandwiches, the venerable PB&J.

sure, but on rye?

it's the caraway you're objecting to. Simply purchase a hearty rye wheat loaf, and it'll work perfectly.

Yes absolutely! rye is amazing!

So is ice cream, but I wouldn't want chunks of steak on top.

Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches are even better

This

I'm not sure if this will be great or I'm being punked.

PB goes kind of well with meat, as do peanut sauces in Asian cuisine. I get the same vibe out of it but only eat organic PB, not the processed garbage which has the texture of liquid plastic.

Peanut butter, bacon, and molasses is even better.

Bacon, bacon, and bacon without bread is my goto.

Can I have that without the bacon?

Uh, this doesn't sound very delicious. Have you considered adding bacon?

I feel like what it really misses is a slice or two of bacon, to make it nice and rounded.

Just ask Elvis. You'll probably see him soon if you eat too many of these ;)

add some banana, cinnamon and you've got my favorite healthy breakfast! fancy coffee shop next door puts pollen on too, subs in almond butter, and it's amazing.

“Healthy” is a bit questionable but that does sound delicious.

Can you detail your complaints against peanut butter, honey, banana, and rye bread?

I studied nutrition in a formal setting for four years, so I could detail some complaints, but I’d like to head yours first.

Sounds like too much sugars/simple carbs for my breakfast taste. The rest of the content (fat, protein, fiber) seem rather OK.

The peanut butter we buy is peanuts made in to butter. But in the supermarket it has a lot of sugar, and some salt to cover the sweetness, I don't understand why - I guess some far rich twat realised her could pack it out with a cheap sugar source and reduce the peanut cost.

Similarly honey is, I gather from various media, not usually just honey but has quite a lot of sugar syrup added.

So, just saying "peanut butter and honey" you'll get quite different supermarket products on different geographies (I'm in the UK, fwiw).

Not sure about honey but just check the peanut butter ingredients? There are some in the shop here which have some sugar and salt added, but there are also varieties with 100% peanuts, though you need to mix the oil before you eat each time.

You pay quite a bit extra for peanut butter without sugar or corn syrup as the second listed ingredient, in the US, and have to look around a bit to find it on the shelves that are 95%+ full of peanut+sugar butter. That's "normal" peanut butter here and lots of folks will wonder WTF you're feeding them if you sub in "real" peanut butter (it tastes quite a bit different and the consistency's different)

This is odd from my perspective (in Canada). Sweetened peanut butter is there for people who have a taste for it. You can usually find unsweetened right next to it for the same price at any store. Salt is surely added for flavour and preservation. It doesn't cover sweetness.

haha i would hope the $10 single slice of this toast at the fancy coffee shop uses real stuff :)

i once looked at the almond butter label that I buy and it has a TON of calories!

Sorry for the late reply.

Peanut butter, if it’s made with just peanuts is fine, assuming that the person can tolerate legumes well. There are better actual nut butters though with better omega 3 to 6 ratios.

Honey is just sugar. The supposed pollen allergy prevention benefits people tout is questionable at best.

Banana is just some potassium with a tiny bit of fiber and lots of sugar. One can get their fiber and potassium from greens or tart fruits easily.

Refined carbs is just not good for you.

Again, I have no problem eating it. I just wouldn’t do it regularly and I wouldn’t personally call it healthy.

Peanut butter and honey on cinnamon bread is fantastic. I'm not sure how good it would be on rye though.

With a side of hummus?

Agreed, but on rye with a side of red pepper hummus?

The PB and honey sandwich was a childhood favourite for me. I must revisit one day to see if it's all I remember it being.

an adult version with quality peanut butter and raw honey on a suitable bread can be quite nice. even better toasted.

It's pretty good on crumpets.

I struggle with finding food that fits my plans that isn't boring and monotonous. To that end, this seems like a useful endeavor, though I'm not sure if it's all the way there.

I actually enjoy peanut butter and honey sandwhichs.

> peanut butter and honey ... sandwich?

Hey, my 5 year old daughter loves that!

This is what I miss about the internet from 15 years ago.

You looked for a recipe back then you'd get a bunch of simple websites with concise instructions that made a fair amount of sense. People wrote it like an old cookbook. Wanted diet advice? Sure there were a few snake oil salesmen but the nutrition information you could find was pretty decent for those people who had put things up.

Today you have a bunch of food entertainers who have turned the entire gambit into such of an utter clown show. You can get a recipe but you'll have to wade through 10 half-page pictures of food that are completely unrelated to what you want to make and clickbait in a scrolling never-ending screen. You can find a video, but instead of it being literally someone's grandma making it with real expertise, it's some 20-something insecure chef emulating what they saw on TV. This level of FUBAR goes way beyond marketing; we have people competing in a race to the bottom.

You try to find a cookbook today, and you've got the same garbage. 90% pictures, 10% text.

"Eat this Much" is just a continuation of this trend; you aren't marketing this as a resource for me to use, if you were, it'd be named something else. The first thing I see when I visit your website isn't something useful. You've got a completely useless webapp, then a bunch of assurance crap below that. If this were a website being shown in the 90's everyone would think you're a scammer. You're marketing this to me like I'm a child and must be instructed on what to do; your brand is looking for guillable people, that's why it's marketed as an instruction, not a tool.

You're doing that because once you have people eating, literally, from your hand, you will !@#! them hard by making marketable suggestions that you will get other companies to pay you top dollar for because they are building relationships with guillable people.

The last thing I need is an app interpreting my cravings for me; It's bad enough you have food companies hiring nutritionists and psychologists to figure out what to put in their products to addict their constituency.

It's a digusting business model and pollutes the information supply for profit.

I'm fairly health conscious and spend weeks at a time logging calories in either a deficit or a surplus.

I do enjoy cooking but, day to day, it's more important for me to meet my macros with minimal investment.

I'm also a vegetarian. It's generally quite difficult to meet your protein goals without meat (especially when out) so I end up eating the same meals quite often.

On entering my calories, this app spun up a number of sensible high protein suggestions and has given me some inspirations for how I can make my diet more interesting.

tldr: I have an above average knowledge of nutrition and a lack of imagination. I found this app useful.

I’m a very active vegetarian that runs/bikes and strength trains 9 times a week (some days include a cardio and strength training session separated by 12 hours). So, needless to say, I need a lot of calories and protein.

I’d recommend you checkout some vegetarian recipes books at the local Barnes and Nobles or on Amazon. The “Complete Vegetarian” is the first cookbook I bought. It offers a great foundation for building some tasty recipes with variety. Roughly 75% of the recipes turned out so well that I shared them with friends and family that enjoyed them equally as much.

For protein, you can get a lot of variety with: tempeh, tofu, millet, peas, quinoa, lentils, black beans, buckwheat, peanut butter etc. The average individual only needs from 50-70g of protein/day according to the USDA. Tempeh has 15g/serving (3 oz) — you can easily eat 2 servings of that and get to about half your daily needs. A serving of quinoa+peas will get you 16-20g protein.

There’s a lot of easy ways to get your daily macros as a vegetarian. Of course, for me, I supplement with 1-2 protein shakes just as I did when I used to eat meat because my requirements are far above-average.

Yes, "Complete Vegetarian" is a great recipe book even if you aren't vegetarian! Many of the recipes are just darn good.

I got Sandwich with carrots and raisins. I don't really see that staying together.

Peanut Butter & Mustard is where its at! Sounds terrible, tastes like ambrosia.

Honestly, I think you should give some of the combinations a try.

1. Peanut butter and honey (or brown sugar) sandwiches were my favorite as a kid and nowadays I just ditch the bread 2. Peanut butter can be a substitute for tahini as a hummus ingredient

Heck, I recently tried: * Pumpkin pie dessert hummus from Costco and loved it. With some strawberries it was gold. * Peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger

Now when it comes to rye, I think the lack of also there is that it's just not good IMO.

If peanut butter and honey isn't your thing, try a banana and mayo sandwich.

My brother's bees make delicious honey, way better than store bought, and it goes fantastically with PB.

My favorite combos:

- Peanut butter + Nutella (add banana for bonus points)

- Peanut butter + chocolate sprinkles

- Strawberry jam + Gouda cheese

Put this on brioche bread... heaven!

There are cooking 'bibles' which go into extreme depth of flavours and textures combinations. Someone could try to codify them

The food choice is US-centric as already pointed out, I want to add that doesn't impact only the macros, but also the prices and availability. For example foods like Buckwheat and Peanut Butter are hard to find in Italy (at least in my region), and when you find them are very expensive (example Buckwheat is around 2£/KG in the UK and around 15€/KG in Italy).

Regarding the macros, the change of proteins, based on the nation is impressive.

Example: Best cottage cheese I can find in Italy: 7% Carbs, 0% Fats, 93% Proteins https://www.myfitnesspal.com/it/food/calories/naturella-fioc...

Best cottage cheese I can find in UK: 11% Carbs, 26% Fats, 63% Proteins https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/light-cottage-che...

Best "cottage cheese" I can find in Lithuania: 11% Carbs, 0% Fatas, 89% Proteins https://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/liesa-varske-0-5-...

You could add in the receipt the macros of the ingredient we need to use, in this way at the super market I can scan various of them and search the closest one

This. I was excited for it a year or two ago, but even in Australia which tends to be somewhat similar to the US it was difficult to follow it. I'm sure it varies by state too, it's probably what you find in Californian supermarkets or something.

It really needs to separate the dishes by region if it's going to succeed internationally. I'd pay good money for this service if it had the exact cheap ingredients in my local supermarkets.

And being US-centric means a lot of the choices a quite gross and really unappealing for people in other countries. Buttered toast? Peanut butter and honey? Yuck, I'd rather not eat at all.

You don't like buttered toast?

I love buttered toast, in the same way that I love candy floss. It's not exactly a 'meal'.

It's a good meal if one is still in middle school...

For most countries it's something you snack with a coffee or tea, not a meal.

I've never heard of that being considered an entire meal America either.

I was going to say this. Wow people believe we think buttered toast is a meal. Isnt the goal to eat less with this site? I would say buttered toast pushed some hunger buttons.

It depends on the proximity of large unplanned cash outlays to payday.

It's not a meal anywhere, not sure where you got that idea.

From the "Automatic MEAL planner" suggesting it as a meal...

That is super goofy, but I promise you, no one in the US thinks it is either.

I had the same reaction reading this post.

I've never heard of peanut butter and honey, must be a regional thing.

I'm pretty sure it's a Great Plains thing. I grew up on it, but most everyone I know has never heard of it.

I will say that it's only delicious if you use typical American heavily salted peanut butter. Canadians should not try this with anything but Kraft unless they are feeling dangerously happy and are in need of a quick day-ruiner.

It's perfectly fine with natural peanut butter too - you can always add salt onto the peanut butter.

You're missing out. Peanut butter and honey sandwiches are amazing.

For context, I grew up in a wide mix of central and eastern USA.

No thanks, I very much don't like peanut butter on sandwiches/bread/toast. The thought of peanut butter on bread makes me wanna gag, it doesn't taste good and the texture is unbearable.

How else would you use peanut butter? Cookies? Chocolates?

Everyone knows it's best eaten with a spoon.

About 2 hours after you should have been asleep, with only the fridge for light.

yes and yes

Cookies: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/9148NkRCVlL...

Chocolates: http://nibblesnscribbles.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Cadb...

you can actually use peanut butter in almost any sweet:

- ice cream - pie - cupcakes - cakes - ...

it's very versatile

I don't really like peanut butter on cookies or chocolate either. Really the only peanut application I like is Asian peanut sauce, and I really love that.

With a spoon, straight from the jar.

Peanut butter burgers is amazing.

With a spoon straight out of the jar.

y, it was a standard school lunch here in the midwest at my school. Chilli, peanut butter and honey sandwich and dill pickle slices were on the tray. So I still eat peanut butter and honey sandwiches, they are great. I also dip a peanut butter and honey sandwich into my chilli (add some hot sauce first), before adding dill pickles and crackers to the chilli, just like at school.

Also had it up here in BC (Canada). But we used to put bananas on it.

Honey, Peanut Butter and Bananas....10 year old me loved that. I could not fathom eating that today!

>Yuck, I'd rather not eat at all.

Wow...that reads like the stereotypical Western child when asked to eat healthy food. However, I don't think I have ever heard even a child say yuck to buttered toast or a peanut butter and honey sandwich.

Once upon a time I might eat either of those things before running half or full marathons...no longer as I avoid bread/carbs/sugar and prefer running in ketosis. I'll say this though, if your fueled by glucose those are both very light meals that will give you great amounts of energy without major insulin spikes (not much in the way of micro nutrients though).

I was recently diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the hip at the age of 35. This finally shocked me into action. For a long time, I have been very active playing sports everyday and exercising but always had a little extra fat on me and was a little slower than I could be. I never had the motivation to change my diet until now.

I went out and read everything I could on osteoarthritis and as it's a degenerative disease you're only hope is to make it last longer at this point and maybe a cure will come. The proven ways to make it last longer are to lose weight and to do exercise.

I spent about 160 hours researching what to do and discover the diet inflammatory index (DII). This is based on every dietary study related to inflammation since 1950 till 2017. I designed a diet specifically around that. I am combining it with intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting that I found through my research is also very powerful in causing autophagy which can help with diseases like osteoarthritis.

I actually have found that since starting this diet my focus and brain power have gone through the roof. I have tons more energy in my hip feels a hundred times better. I am excited to continue this journey. I'd highly recommend anyone interested to look at this as well. I'm not one of those people that sells any crap related to this, this is just the research I have done into scientific studies around nutrition and its impact on disease.

Are you a commie, not liking buttered toast, what world am I living in here?

I selected keto and it suggested an arugula salad for lunch that had 61 calories, no thanks!

You have that much disdain for... butter on toast? Where are you from exactly? Mars?

In France the « Jambon beurre » sandwich is (was?) one of the most eated meal and is baguette + butter + ham. Also personally I’m fit and I eat a lot of buttered bread with added cheese everyday. I have the chance to have artisan bread and raw milk cheese available everywhere though. Honey everyday too (in tea and in yogurts).

Where I live (Trieste) most supermarkets have Peanut Butter. You can find it also in "ethnic" shops or in organic food shops (in italiano negozi di prodotti biologici).

I used "at least in my region" for this specific reason, I was expecting that outside my region (Sardinia) is easier to find. You can find it in ethnic shops, however, because there's a small number of them the price is inflated by a good degree.

And the one that I think is the good peanut butter (according to my taste), is impossible to find and I need to have it shipped from UK https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/263926798

> Buckwheat

That one's not common in food in the US, either. A lot more "odd" ingredients are widely available now than used to be in the US, so you can find it without too much trouble, but it's still not something most are familiar with. I cook a fair bit and I've only used it because I decided to try making Breton buckwheat crêpes, and I'm sure I could find other ways to use it but I'd have to go out of my way to do so. Wouldn't be surprised if it's present in a couple regional US cuisines in a minor way (cajun?) but it's not something most people eat regularly, if at all.

If you want to try another recipe with buckwheat, you can cook it like rice. You rinse the buckwheat, and then you boil it. At the end drain it, and add a sauce (usually butter) and it's ready to eat.

I used to eat it in that way (outside Italy), and it's normally a side of a main dish, for example roasted chicken and buckwheat (instead of potatoes).

Is it sticky? I'm trying to create a good veggie-burger, and need something that can form a patty when I mix in the beans etc.

Mashed it might stick together. The whole grains are way less sticky on the outside than rice.

I'm sorry, it never happen to me that got sticky, even when I cook it without rinsing it and without adding butter.

If you need to make them vegetarian and not vegan, I recommend eggs that are a good binder.

If you need to go vegan you can try with a starch binder, for example you can use cornflour mixed with water (I find easy to make a cornflour binder, by cooking some water and adding cornflour slowly with a strainer and mixing well, then cooking it until the consistency is dense enough) when it gets cold the cornflour mix becomes a gelatine ball. You can try also using mashed potatoes, but you need to be careful with water.

I may be missing something but I don’t see the 93% proteins figure, it’s more like 13g per 100g so 13%. Also it would be the same or higher than whey protein. I would have loved that.

93% refers to the amount of calories from proteins for 100g compared to the amount of calories for 100g. If you open the myfitnesspal link, you will see that it shows as figure 93%, this helps eating foods that helps reach your macros.

Oh I see, thanks. Personally I find easier to use the total amount of a macro in a day: I aim for 100g protein, know that by restricting carbs I will be under 100g carbs, and add fat if I’m too low in total calorie at the end of the day (when I do a lot of physical activity or when bulking with strength training).

This is a cool idea that I'd personally love to see work in some form or another.

In my experience, though, the tedium of tracking macros and the like has probably been the biggest obstacle for being consistent. When I cut now, just maintaining some very simple principles like "eat less, eat vegetables, it's OK to feel hungry" has been vastly more useful long-term than weighing food on scales and calculating BMI every week... But maybe that's just me.

This solution might make for a nice compromise.

When I first started learning about and applying personal finance principles, I counted every dollar going in and out of my accounts, made projections, and planned for everything. This conscious effort very effectively changed my spending habits to the point where finance principals are now second nature. For many people, getting started with dieting requires(or is at least helped by) such a conscious effort too.

>eat less, eat vegetables, it's OK to feel hungry

I think one of the biggest things a person can do is move away from the three daily meal regimen that as I understand is a relatively modern invention. After a few weeks or so you don't miss breakfast anymore, especially if you're the type to drink coffee in the morning.

Right but merely skipping breakfast won't ensure you'll consume fewer calories in a day. There are recorded advantages to breakfast consumption with regards to metabolism etc. It's worth experimenting to suit preference. Maybe when trying to run a deficit, skipping is easier, but that doesn't apply to me.

part of the problem is that the conventional american breakfast (cereal, fruit, maybe some toast) is almost entirely carbs. unless you go to the trouble of frying some eggs, you're getting off to a bad start that will leave you crashing by the end of the morning and overeating at lunch.

That’s why eggs are so often part of breakfast menus. Eggs with cheese on toast is a fairly solid breakfast option. Alternatively, bacon or sausage are also popular.

You can also up the fat content with some creamer in your coffee rather than sugar.

I've dealt with insomnia for most of my life (I regularly saw the clock pass midnight when I was 8, just laying in bed) and making sure I ate breakfast early every morning has seemed to be one of the most effective ways to fight it.

After experimenting with various options, breakfast settled on a few handfuls of hazelnuts and coffee with sugar. It turns out to be impossible to overeat hazelnuts because they're chewy and filling^1, it requires literally no preparation, and it keeps me full for a while. I find unsalted nuts go better with coffee; salt clashes somehow.

I regularly see people snacking 1 bag of nuts (250g, 1700 kcal) or even 2 bags a day mindlessly in front of their computer at work.

I think snacking is the key concept here. I just eat quickly until I'm full and put the bag away. Lots of things are unhealthy when you just eat them out of boredom.

Imagine sitting next to a huge amount of any other kind of food all day!

I fully agree.

OTOH These people have had it drilled into them that:

- Calories are a lie. The model is incorrect (true) and should therefore be completely ignored/rejected (false)

- Fats are good. Nuts are healthy.

- 'Grazing' food all day is good.

I am also convinced that nuts are healthy. Can you provide arguments otherwise? They are full of unsaturated fats, protein, and fiber, which, paired with an overall balanced diet, make them for sure a net positive.

I'm not saying that nuts aren't healthy. You have to take the combination of the 3 points.

I am saying that unrestricted over-consumption of any food type is bad. Now make extreme over-consumption easy/feasible by selecting high energy density foods presented in a slow but steady consumption pattern that will defy any form of natural satiety limit and you end up with a very unhealthy accumulation of energy extracted from otherwise healthy foods.

I am not making these stories up. I see people consuming 2 bags of nuts, that is 3400 kcal, outside and on top of 3 heavy meals of cheeses and meats per day, and they truly wonder what it is they are doing wrong and why they aren't losing weight as they are completely following 'low carb' diets.

>Nuts are healthy.

There is a great deal of scientific evidence supporting nut consumption. This is not just because they contain fat, but because the fat they contain is monounsaturated, they are slow to digest, and they are good sources of fiber (particularly almond/hazelnut/pecan):

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/647S/4690007

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...

https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-...

> ‘Grazing’ food all day is good.

I don’t think I’ve encountered this philosophy much in the wild. I would never endorse it.

I do understand the practical necessity of snacking sometimes when you’re trying to get work done on a schedule. In these cases I think it helps to drink plenty of water with any snacks.

It's the fallacy found first in the list the causes the issue:

>- Calories are a lie. The model is incorrect (true) and should therefore be completely ignored/rejected (false)

>- Fats are good. Nuts are healthy.

>- 'Grazing' food all day is good.

Good fats are good for you and nuts are a source of such fats. For some, eating more frequent, smaller portions makes it easier to hit a reasonable caloric intake for the day. However, add in that calories are a lie and ignore the fact that nuts are calorie dense, and you get people eating 3000 kcal of nuts in a day by grazing on healthy foods.

In another thread, the mention of weighing foods for a while seems to counter this. It's just not that intuitive that a small bag of nuts can have enough calories for a meal (at least is wasn't always to me). As a child of the midwest, it took some time to deprogram my concept of healthy portions, so I can admit to falling into some version of this trap for many year, and still do on occasion.

Intermittent fasting seems to have health benefits.

Agreed. I did a couple of cuts using templates from Renaissance Periodization, measuring out every single thing that I ate. I think that's a very useful exercise for people who are totally clueless (it amazes me how little of a conception people have). But once you've done that once or twice, you have a feel for what a (healthy) caloric deficit feels like and you just embrace some hunger, as you said, keep protein relatively high, and the other obvious principles. Measuring everything just doesn't seem worthwhile unless you're trying to step on stage and even then you might not need to do so.

I've never been able to stick with tracking macros for very long for similar reasons. Following a meal plan takes a bit of time to set up, but once I have everything in place, I get a huge sense of relief throughout the week whenever I eat. There's never a question of what I'm going to eat, or if I'm eating too much or too little, and I can be confident that I'm making progress toward my weight goal (whether it's bulking or cutting).

I think the main downside is a lack of flexibility, which can throw me off the wagon for a while if I miss one too many meals by going out with friends. Improving flexibility is one of our goals right now, and adding better support for restaurant meals, so hopefully not a big downside for too much longer.

Following a meal plan is a form of tracking calories.

I tend to stick to a handful of "meals" when I'm cutting just to make the counting easier.

Once you have the meals entered in MFP, it takes seconds to log an entire day's worth of eating.

Eating out is always hard. It feels stupid to skip a good food choice (e.g. a food stall) just because I can't determine its macros. Still, I'd rather get the cut done and resume normal eating ASAP!

For me using an app like "My Macros+" where you can search for and add your own custom recipes has been the best change I have made. Once you have done it for a couple of weeks then a lot of the recipes for the food you eat are already in the app. Then every time you eat a meal going forward it only takes about 5 seconds to log it. The app sums the macro nutrients for you and you can see if you are on track. If I'm a little behind I know I can have a 1/4 cup of peanuts or a protein bar or whatever and I will be back on track. I never weigh food on scales or calculate BMI.

Tracking macros is really boring so people either give up dieting or converge to a simpler approach. In my case I just watch protein closely to make sure I get around 150g per day and then I adjust energy calories accordingly. Fat is pretty easy because I get most of it through my animal sources of protein. I avoid foods with added fat. In the end for me it is just a matter of cutting back on the carbs a bit.

I would guess that most americans who try to "eat healthy" (or at least not eat take-out / fast food all the time) probably don't get enough fat. I'm always sad when I go to the grocery store and realize that only the premium yogurt has >2% milkfat. I find that when I deliberately choose the full fat version of things I feel satisfied after consuming many fewer calories.

I make yogurt by the gallon in an Instant Pot.

Couldn't be simpler, and at the rate I consume the stuff it paid for the pot fairly quickly.

I consider low-fat dairy products a hustle by dairy producers to sell the low-value leftovers of extracting butter. Don't fall for it.

You can rest assured that the dietfashionmediamachine has been advertizing the "fat is good" matra very effectively for the last 10 years.

Except everyone is still scared to death of saturated fat, which may actually have unique satiety mechanisms (see video below for a dive into saturated fat and reverse electron transport). There's some questions about the Ancel Keys studies that lead to the demonization of saturated fat as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIRurLnQ8oo

I'm sorry but the Keto family of diets has been the mainstream mantra for the last decade.

It also fails so many people because the supposed satiety mechanism only seems to work shorttime for most practitioners.

Most, if not nearly all, fail to match satiety in line with reduced caloric need as they go through the initial weight-loss phase. Even worse, most experience a habituatiuon and start increasing the amount of (low-carb/high fat) energy intake, negating the initial benefits and reverting to a state of over-consumption and stored energy surplus.

Mainstream keto does not seek to avoid polyunsaturated fat, which we've been taught is heart healthy. This theory isn't keto, it's rather that the society wide switch away from saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat has disrupted satiety mechanisms. Some people are even examining these ideas with adequate carbs, example search term: "the croissant diet".

> eat vegetables

It was recently said on an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast (with Pavel Tsatsouline in this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4qVbVJhZaY at 7:18) that fruit + vegetables don't do as many positive things for us as previously thought.

Noticed a bit of a load spike, cool to see our site posted on HN :) Let me know if you have any feedback or questions and I'll do my best to respond.

Why, when I chose metric on registration do I get my meals in ounces?

There doesn't appear to be any way to delete my account.

It should auto-convert units like ounces and pounds, but I'm not 100% sure if it does on the apps. As a fallback, we show gram weights on everything, but obviously not the most convenient to bust out a scale all the time.

To delete your account, click your username -> membership status -> delete account.

I do one-meal-a-day. The website returned 18 servings of egg and 10 slices of bread. Maybe there should be a maximum serving per meal.

Oof yeah. It's currently configured to max out at 3 servings unless a meal's target is >1500 calories, and then it uncaps. That's caused a few complaints, so we'll likely revert it.

One workaround in the meantime is to ask for more meals, and then just eat them all at once :) You can also drag items between meals if you want to reorg them.

This is really nice. I love the UI, and am probably going use pieces as inspiration for something very unrelated I'm building.

Are you building this as a side gig? How many hours per week is going into it?

Thanks! I started it as a learn-to-program project almost 8 years ago, and it's slowly grown since then with 7 people working full time on it now. It actually got posted on HN in 2013, and the boost helped me enough to hire my cofounder.

Wow. Great job! Will definitely be giving it a go.

I used to use this, and it doesn't seem to distinguish between perishable and not. It'll make a shopping list for one week and throw away a ton of leftovers. Also, it was pretty tough to get it to meet macro targets.

Food waste is my criticism as well. Two tablespoons of black beans? Two sticks of celery? And then do what with the rest?

It's suggesting Avocado Toast for breakfast. I'll never be able to afford a home if I use your app!

Is okay though. Most of the Oz is on fire, so there won't be a lot of homes anyway.

Had never seen this before

not sure how much I’ll use it with the holidays coming up :)

Not sure if these two issues are still current but here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841027

Responded, thanks!

A minor critique, I got recommended strawberry oatmeal, with strawberrys, rolled oats, fat reduced milk and brownulated sugar.

I'm aware there are lots of differing opinions on macros, but I would certainly skip the sugar (given there already is 2 cups of strawberries) and go for regular/whole milk, which should even out fairly similar on kcals.

I noticed the paleo and keto options, but seeing as the oats, milk and strawberries already push this outside of those diets, it's still an awkward default recipe.

My very nitpicky 2c.

Great work!

Hey! I really like this concept, and I could imagine myself as a paying user for a service like this.

Some feedback:

1. I can't see any information at all about the different membership plans. It says "Get started with a free account", but there's no information about what a free account includes and what other types there are.

2. You mention Google/Facebook remarketing in your privacy policy, which is a gigantic turn-off for me.

3. Regenerating a meal while hovering over a food item causes this bug to happen: https://send.firefox.com/download/476d36ae77d82097/#0LA0xL7u...

really like the ui and experience, you're on to something here

these meals just seem...odd. I have a very basic diet, no avacado toast or carrots with hummus. maybe your initial options could have like, burgers and fries or pizza or something that's more standard? my first impression is that this a great website, but the meals aren't for someone like me

A lot of the recipe quantities are unreasonable. This is a common outcome of taking base recipes and scaling them without thinking. For steamed potatoes I got:

* 1 5/8 medium potato

* 5/8 tbsp butter

* 5/8 tsp dill

* 3/8 tsp garlic

* 1/16 dash salt

These aren't real measurements, nor do many of them matter. Only the butter and potatoes matter here and since "medium potato" means basically anything the specific amount is largely worthless. Yes, there are gram amounts below but you are better off rounding to something reasonable (just round the butter down and don't even include measurements for things like dill).

More generally, this feels very much like the HN approach to cooking (there have been many similar tools) rather than a general product with a wide audience. What led you to believe that this is a product that serves a serious need? In my experience, people who know how to cook don't need this and people who don't know how to cook are going to see a lot of these recipes and panic. BlueApron seems to have hit a similar problem, where once their customers learned how to cook they just do it themselves.

This is rad. Some feedback:

1) Don't require me to choose between Male/Female. Let me leave that blank if I'd prefer.

2) If I put 6 in the 'feet' in height, and nothing in the inches, it probably means I'm 6 feet even. Don't make me go back and type in the 0.

3) Alliums (garlic, onion, leeks, etc) are a common intolerance you might want to consider adding to your list. Mushrooms also?

4) The vegetables list is not alphabetized (sprouts appears dead in the middle of the list)

5) Why is Sugar in the 'Grains' category?

5) because it comes in... Grainular form?

...

I’ll see myself out now.

1) We've gotten this request a few times before, but we use a standard calorie estimation equation that depends on this. Not quite sure what the alternative should be.

2) Good point, will add it to our to-do list.

3) Also good idea - in the meantime, you can add text filters at the bottom of the suggestions list for anything we missed. If it matches anything in the recipe name or ingredients, it'll exclude the recipe.

4 & 5) Definitely a little weird, and surprised no one has mentioned this before. Maybe recently changed? Added to the to-do list too.

Last time I used it I ran into the problem at it sometimes was too specific with the ingredients I already had. For example; I have 5kg of rice, it would recommend me only recipes with that type of rice. While I understand that some recipes are better with long grain or short grain, at the time I was hoping to find an option to have my rice substitute "any" rice. Is there a solution for this?

For 1, you could just use the average of the two values and mention it to the user.

> Don't require me to choose between Male/Female. Let me leave that blank if I'd prefer.

Given this is probably used to calculate Basic metabolic rate, what would you suggest for blank, the average?

Serious question, I don't mean to offend. But does it not make sense in these cases to put the responsibility with you. As in you would at least know biologically if you fall closer to male or female for the purpose of BMR calculation.

The average of the output of the formulae (I know it's not just as simple as changing a constant input), or let me customize the number would be fine for me.

Or show me a range. Using the Mifflin-St. Jeor equation, I need 1780 calories using the female equation and 1935 using the male.

The Harris-Benedict equation says I need 1760 if I'm female and 2075 if I'm male.

Looking at those numbers, I'd probably start with a baseline of something in between and trust that whatever I ended up eating in a day would have some variance anyhow. There's not a huge range between those values.

I have used this one for a few weeks, several months ago. At the time, there were 2 main issues:

* The food selection was too US-centric - for example, where I live items like sausages tend to have a different nutritional content compared to their US counterparts. I think these types of food should have localised versions.

* Weird portions once you select Metric: for example there were a lot of foods where the default quantity was 28.34 grams - I suspect because that's an ounce in the US.

Thanks for the feedback!

1) This is true, we are pretty US centric at the moment. Most of our basic-food nutrition data comes from the USDA database, so that biases it a bit. We have some ideas for making it easier to localize the suggested foods, but it might be a little while before we get it in there.

2) We should probably round the numbers there a bit, but you're right, we just convert things like ounces to grams if you select metric units.

This looked really exciting at first and I signed-up immediately, hoping to stop thinking about "what I should cook tonight?". However after seeing an Oreo milkshake suggestion for lunch time I'm not sure how healthy the recipes are.

If the diet selection included a low-sugar option, then it may be much more useful for me.

One of our philosophies is that we don't enforce our own beliefs about what's healthy or not. What's healthy depends largely on the person (and everyone has different opinions), but we're there to help with portioning to make sure you're not eating too much or too little.

For a lifter trying to gain weight, a milkshake might be perfectly fine. For someone trying to lose, it's probably not the most satiating choice, but as long as it fits your targets, shouldn't throw you off your goals. For those people, you can hit the refresh button in the meal until you see something you're happy with.

Not to say there isn't room for improvement - we should probably remove things like milkshakes if your goal is to lose weight, or maybe limit them to marked cheat-days.

>For a lifter trying to gain weight, a milkshake might be perfectly fine.

Y’all should look into insulin resistance. Huge loads of sugar being bad for you is fairly settled science, with foods that have a High Glycemic Index(GI) being linked to the development of Insulin Resistance. This is only the most tested link between high GI foods and higher all cause mortality[1]. The linked study is on a population of high Cardiovascular risk, however considering the website is for dieting that might make it more relevant. There’s a good reason the WHO guideline for sugar is a maximum of 10% of your caloric intake and a recommendation if 5%.[2]

I want to eat 1800 kcal in 2 vegetarian meals and a sample suggestion is 3 eggs and veggies(which is great) for the first meal, followed by 2 apples and almond butter and 2 bananas with yogurt for the second(labeled lunch). That’s terrible, and going to set my diet up for failure. That’s like 18% of your caloric intake as sugar, and in your last meal no less. You are going to burn through all that sugar and then feel hungry/hangry as hell when the insulin load in your body doesn’t match your blood sugar.

Seriously, the way your website treats sugar is completely negligent considering it’s proposition is that it’s an alternative to counting macros. I’d love to be able to suggest your website but my impression today is awful.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176720/

[2]https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-gui...

It would be nice if I could indicate which meals are important to me if I pick fewer than 3 meals a day. Breakfast and lunch is not a winning combination, whereas "that small meal at 10:30 that doesn't really have a name" and "that meal at 5pm that doesn't have a name" would be useful.

Hit the 3-dot menu next to a meal's name to edit its settings. You can change the name (among other things), but it might complain if you try to reuse one of the default names.

That's not what I care about if I just need a recommendation instead of making this website my religion. I have no desire to become intimate with this website: it seems useful, and so it's reasonable to assume it gives useful information by default, not "after customizing it".

It currently tells people to have "breakfast" and "lunch". That's misleading at best, as those words are tied to ambiguous times, and don't result in a healthy eating schedule.

So even better: don't use meal names, use words like "shortly after waking up", "halfway through your day", etc. and then let people customise _those_ to map to words like "breakfast" or "lunch" if that's what they map to for them.

This is amazing especially with the vegetarian options. I saw some comments about issues within a meal. I find it to be a creative way to get outside my comfort zone. However I do see 2 meals in the same day that are too similar. Some days have 2 meals with sandwiches for each while others don't even have a sandwich. If you can optimize the algorithm to address this variety issue, I am much more likely to follow it more strictly. Thanks for providing this service!

For people with a big calorie budget (I put in 3k) the suggestions are pretty hilarious.

EX: This breakfast

    3 ham and cottage cheese sandwich (eww, btw)
    1 Whole wheat toast

The way it starts just adding more servings of things instead of more variety is a bit amusing

If you have a big calorie budget, try bumping up the meal's complexity from Simple to Moderate (via the 3-dot menu next to the meal). We should probably do that by default if you enter more than a certain number of calories.

First discussed in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359542

A large Show HN in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640336

I wanted to create something like this ~10 years ago when I got into fitness! In fact, a few years later I decided to get serious about it and found out that this had launched and gave up on the idea.

Obviously, it seems super useful as a starting point. In order to be a real meal planning option however you'd have to optimize for micro-nutrients in the long term, and I'm pretty sure this isn't covered.

My only complaint is if I pick “2 meals” it shows breakfast and lunch rather than lunch and dinner and I can’t get it to flip.

Anyone know how to fix that?

Edit: even if I pick 3 meals, it comes up with a snack. I just want breakfast and dinner, is that bad?

Had the same thought. I find it very easy to skip breakfast and still not feel the need to go overboard at lunch but I have a hard time falling asleep if I didn't eat a filling dinner. Lunch + dinner only lifestyle fits me much better than breakfast + lunch only, I know a lot of people who try to fast from 8 PM to noon who do the same.

Surely this data can't be right, I'm 5 foot 7 and 84kg, this has recommended 3100 calories a day. Won't that just make me gain loads of weight?

It depends on how much muscle mass you have, which it should at least approximate properly unless you did not enter the bodyfat percentage correctly. I think this just uses an average base metabolic rate as well, so if you fall significantly outside of that norm (much slower than expected, for example) then that will skew the results towards the wrong end of the scale also.

I could only replicate that by setting the activity level to 'very active' (hard exercise 6-7 days per week). At 'lightly active' it recommends closer to 2400. Seems reasonable.

I’ve used both this and Platejoy, and I prefer the latter. It may have changed, but Eat This Much would routinely prescribe strange meals to meet desired macro targets. I remember one being a can of tuna, a raw red pepper, and a slice of cheddar.

Do you know how many parts of an insect are in each jar? According to Scientific American, each of us eats about 0.5-1kg of flies, maggots and other bugs a year, hidden in the chocolate we eat, the grains we consume, the peanut butter we spread on toast. According to US regulations (which are easier to access than Australian data), 125g of pasta (a single portion) may contain an average of 125 insect fragments or more, and a cup of raisins can have a maximum of 33 fruit fly eggs. A kilogram of flour probably has 15g of animal product in it, from rodent excreta to weevils to cockroach legs.

Where is the pricing page? I do not want to sign up for a service that I cannot afford later on, or that looks like a scam.

Heh perfect for about 13ish days from now...

Haha. You have control over the menu?

You’re right, definitely don’t :-)

I'd love to be able to skip breakfast! 2 meals selects breakfast and lunch, but i just want lunch and dinner

For me, I'd love to weight the meal size. I like a moderate breakfast, small lunch, (relatively) larger dinner.

Its generating larger lunches than dinners.

What people need is a plan to buy groceries for n days (likely 7 but may be 3, 4 or 1) and a list of meals for each day. That are good. Make it specific to singles and it’ll be really cool.

That's pretty close to what we do - we fill in a calendar with suggested meals to hit your nutrition goals and give you a grocery list, which you can change the # of days on.

It works well for singles, though if you're picky, you'll need to configure the options a bit to get meals that you consistently consider "good". Otherwise you'll likely have to regenerate a few of the meals to make sure everything looks good before shopping.

Ok I’ll look more closely. The first interaction I has suggested a few odd meals and I figured it didn’t make sense to shop for them

Unfortunately I can’t see how this functionality works without entering credit card info

Slightly overkill, but just as a thought experiment, it would be neat to have something where you declare calories / macros / food preferences, how much time you have to cook and how many cheat days you want.

Then the system will figure out all of the ingredients for you, ship them to you through Instacart on a regular basis, put reminders on your calendar for when you should cook what, and optimize both for nutrition, variety, time and food waste.

We have some features for most of these things, but you have to dig a bit for it. To edit the macro targets: https://imgur.com/u08DLNy

To change cook times, click the 3-dot menu next to the meal, and then when you regenerate, the plans will match whatever your latest settings have been changed to.

You can create a free account and use the single day generator, plus use it as a tracker, but with the subscription, we'll send you a weekly grocery list that you can export to Instacart (or amazon fresh) for delivery.

Good idea but poor execution. Asking for 1,500kcal over two meals, I was presented with tomato & onion on toast and an apple for breakfast, and tuna salad & avocado plus a bowl of carrots for lunch. Ideally I would have been able to choose lunch + dinner, and something a bit more exciting - plus, I don't really like tuna!

If you click the 3-dot menu next to a meal's name you can edit that meal's settings, including changing things from Breakfast to Lunch.

You'll probably also want to bump up the Complexity setting from Simple to Moderate to get some more interesting things.

Very interesting to get ideas (as someone already used to counting macros). The default macro ratio seems a bit high in protein, personally I would recommend lowering a bit the carbs and upping the fat.

Also from my experience (lost 25kgs 15 years ago, fit) aiming to lower carbs in western diet usually has the side effect to forcing lower calories, not because you eat less carbs per se, but because a lot of food that can be abused and/or that are junk are carb based. I you aim for low carb and high fat/protein you automatically are looking at the better nutritional option if you eat out. And things like pasta or pizza are way too easy to refill for me, but with a plate of a protein and side vegetables I feel satiated after one serving.

I think keto is too extreme if you are not a nutrition geek, but just aiming at reducing carbs should get you a long way in losing weight and eating more healthy without overthinking it.

I love this idea, but I think it needs a little work... maybe something that helps it avoid combining foods that are too similar into the same meal?

For breakfast, it keeps suggesting I eat a "high protein omelet" and 4 hard boiled eggs. That's a lot of egg in one meal. I don't want an omelet AND boiled eggs at the same time.

This is a good idea well implemented. There is much bemoaning the state of web experiences these days. Visiting this site and poking around, trying out their onboarding workflow, and seeing initial results, provides a welcome counterpoint. I'm in for the free plan. Now, to do the thing is another matter, of course.

Love the product, and have been following for years, but can you guys fix http://swole.me? I like EatThisMuch but I don't need the meal generation and the fancy features -- I just need a quick and dirty way to create estimated meal plans!

Ah, looks like the food search killed itself again. Is that what you're referring to? I gotta add some restart watcher to the search process

this is very nice UI, and with some improvements, would be very handy.

Some feedback - 1) It should provide additional filters like 'gluten-free', 'histamine-intolerant' etc. 2) When I suggest 2 meals, it assumes that it is breakfast & lunch - when I might be thinking - lunch and dinner. Allow user to pick the option. 3) When it provides me the choices - lets say breakfast - eggs, onions and tomato omlet, then it should list these 3 ingredients - and i am allergic to 'tomato' - i can then scratch it off and ask it to 'refine' -- the next time, it should not return dishes that have tomato in them as a main dish.

The food filters are pretty limited until you create a basic account. Then you can do gluten free or any keyword based exclusions, but we don't have any data to factor in histamine intolerance.

You can also edit the meal settings if you click the 3-dot menu next to the meal name, or we have a "Week layout" editor that you can use to mix/match meals.

You can also give a "thumbs down" to specific ingredients like tomatoes and it will exclude recipes that have them on future regenerates.

We've tried to cram a lot of features into the app, but now one of our biggest challenges is managing the complexity and surfacing the most useful things people want. So this is very useful feedback to know what comes to mind first when you use the app :)

You may want to add a similarity checker on the foods. I put in "vegetarian" and got the profoundly stimulating options of "mashed chickpeas" and "carrots with hummus" for lunch.

I tried the vegan meal planner but was a bit disappointed. I love the UI, good job. The value of the planner - not so much. It pretty much kept recommending meals like sandwiches and tofu smoothies and tofu stir-fries or stuff like hummus without any bread lol.

Would be awesome if you had a wfpb (whole-food plant-based) options as I feel like that is the healthiest possible diet one can follow (no animal products, no oil, low fat, no highly processed foods). It would probably be a bit harder than the usual american diets, but oh well.

I wish you all the luck with your product!

This looks really cool. I’ll play around with it a bit next year, but just from the first look, I might want premium :)

One suggestion: When selecting a ketogenic diet, change carb-target to net carbs automatically, or have a note telling one that this is an option.

One question: I found the family/couple planning article [0], is there a plan to expand this in the future so it’s easier?

[0]: https://help.eatthismuch.com/help/how-does-the-family-meal-p...

That's great to hear, thanks!

Re: your suggestion, I think it's supposed to switch to net carbs automatically - did it not do this for you?

For family meal planning, are you looking to have it meet two people's different targets? The simplest approach might be if we let you add a second person and you can set a % of your intake that they should eat, but then you'll likely have to weigh some fraction of their servings to have any accuracy (or at least some good eye-balling). Is that doable for you? I'm not sure there's an easily workable solution if the other family members need their own custom targets.

Auto switching: Nope, I was wondering why the generation was higher than my 20g target, after switching to net carbs it showed 17 for the day.

Family: I’d be fine with weighing. I’d love to be able to add a second person and set their calories goal, then have the meal planner spit out meals for the combined target while showing weight/percentage for each person.

I love the loading text

Combobulate calories... Chopping onions... Crying because of onions...

Why is 4 meals the default option? Do Americans usually eat 4 meals a day?

It's breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack

Why’d you jump right to “Americans”? There’s plenty of other countries with as many meals as us.

Because the site is US-centric. And 4 meals a day is not that common and it's definitely unnecessary for most people.

If that's their goal, I hope people eating 4 meals a day realize they would lose weight by eating only 2 meals a day (without having to change what they eat).

This looks very interesting, but i think something is wrong with it. For 2 meals and 1900 calories, one meal contains 2 avocados, 300g of tuna and a few other stuff. Isn't it a bit excessive ?

This website made me realize that I become completely disoriented if I see a meal plan that isn't built around a base of rice+beans. I wonder if other Latin American people here felt the same.

Yes, this so much. Here in Brazil a basic meal includes a nice proportion of rice and beans, with some vegetables and for the onivores, a portion of meat.

I'd like to be able to skip breakfast with the tool. When you select 2 meals, you get breakfast & lunch. With 3, it adds dinner. I want 2 meals, but lunch & dinner.

Nice idea, though it did not work for me:

- there is difference between carbs from glycemic load perspective - e.g. white rice vs oatmeal are totally different carbs for the same carb amount. You may think that you eat right amount of calories but your excess fat will not start to get metabolized if your insulin levels are high because of regular fast carbs intake.

- same thing for "fat" - olive oil vs pork - no breakdown of saturated/unsaturated fats - seems important for eating healthy

The bigger problem is we know so much less about the human body than we pretend. Everyone in this industry is falsely projecting confidence and giving wildly extrapolated advice on the basis of very fractionary projections of a highly dimensional complex system.

Eat moderate amounts of many different low processed foods' is by far the most rational advice, but sadly at odds with a food and diet industry that wants you to consume.

The keto generator needs a bit of work. It was suggesting waaaaay too many carbs. Throwing in things like oranges where bacon would be the better keto option

Can I ask how many calories you entered? We've made a lot of improvements to hitting low carb targets recently, but maybe not for certain calorie ranges.

Keto is a fixed 25g

I don't see the technical aspects of this project being discussed as much. Could you the author share some of the technical difficulties with a project like this? For instance, what were the hardest part to make this work? What are some improvements that you are planning on doing? Since it seems that the planner still has room for improvements as can be seen in the discussions here.

Any plans on adding family support? It would be cool if you could put in our whole family's needs and it generate a meal plan for everyone.

You know, I your heart of hearts, you’re not going to generate a plan on this site and stick to it... but, likewise, you’ll remember roughly what the plan would have been, giving you a slightly better idea of the boundaries of a “good” diet and when you’re in which side of them. And that could add years to your life!

I like the idea. It would be great if they could extend it to show macros and let you choose a goal (e.g. build muscle, loose fat). In that regard I really like Scooby's meal planner: http://www.custommealplanner.com/

They do let you choose a goal? Lose weight, maintain, build muscle.

I feel like the need to log in and the way the signup is structured obscure what's the actual most potentially valuable part of this service to me, which is the integration with Instacart. It's also not clear how well that integration would actually work in practice, which makes me pretty wary about it.

Good point. The instacart integration works alright, but could be better if we had a tighter integration. We basically send them a text version of the grocery list and they just show searched matches for each item that you have in your grocery list.

For some idea, here's a screenshot of the grocery list page, and a link to the Instacart order page where you choose the matches (although Instacart's page is down for me right now):

Grocery list: https://imgur.com/F6lsdXi

Order page: https://www.instacart.com/store/partner_recipe?guest=true&pa...

Food Allergies. Please support food allergies.

If it is supported, it is difficult to tell, and thusly I can't use the service.

The "I don't want to eat" screen under "Food Preferences" allows a pretty wide variety of exclusions.

I saw that there’s a warning if someone’s weight loss goal is dangerously fast, which I think is great. The creators should also consider limiting the app from recommending dangerously underweight goals (the app will happily recommend that starve yourself to achieve extremely low BMIs)

About Food Choice: Can I flip the concept and say “I want my diet to look like {{this}} and want to eat a pizza” and it tells me how much pizza to eat PLUS what from my diet I’m lacking, and make suggestions that could help make up the difference (a protein shake with a,b, and c)?

I played with the concept a couple of years ago (mathfood.com as a proof of concept / toy / abandoned side project); and for me it was easier to build a meal I wanted to eat; plug it in; and it would tell me how much to eat PLUS what I was short on macros. Those, I would plug with supplements (protein powder, fish oil pills, fruit). Not fun, but you hit your macros...

I think we emailed a bit many years back :) I like the idea behind mathfood, and thought it would make a really cool tool, like a smoothie-builder that figured out the right portions for your macro targets to round out your day's targets. Never got around to adding it as our main focus for a while has been to tone down the app's complexity, but maybe someday.

We did. Kudos on your success!

Nice! My girlfriend is on a low fodmap diet (see https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fodmaps-101 ), it would be awesome if that were a dietary choice...

A big fan from way back. I was doing the "six snacks a day each less than or equal to 300 calories" a while back. Yes, they do have some weird combos, but the cream cheese + smoked salmon in a tortilla (300 calories) is still a fave breakfast.

It seems at first glance that there is no way to pick that you are both a vegetarian and want to follow a ketogenic diet. They are not mutually exclusive in real life, but in the diet-preference-picker on the website this seems to be the case.

Once you create a basic account you can customize the food preferences however you like. The preset diet options simply pre-select some food exclusions for you, but you can select "anything" and create your own set of exclusions from scratch.

As a forewarning, keto + vegetarian or vegan is one of the tougher things for our algorithms to do well. Maybe we're missing some critical recipes that keto vegetarians use, but it eliminates something like 90% of our available recipes.

I'd like to use this with my patients but we use kilojoules, not calories.

You need to offer more questions up front and offer more choices of meals for this to be a product people will actually use as opposed to a demonstration project. Also be cognizant that not everyone cooks.

What would you expect a tool like this to suggest for people who don't cook?

I had the opposite problem - with simple meals (the default) it looks like I was barely required to cook at all, just getting recommendations for some carrots and hummus or fruit on bread.

I guess that's something you could expect from a tool that doesn't require cooking.

I don't want to be that guy, but looking at the first photo on this site made me think "you can eat whatever you want if your hobby is running in the mud with a sandbag on your shoulders".

This is awesome, but doesn't seem to work for people looking to gain healthy weight.

5,000 calories/day is hard enough without needing to eat 3 bowls of corn flakes and 9 cups of greek yogurt for breakfast.

As a food addict I don't think this kind of statement will ever make sense to me. I have to work ridiculously hard at not consuming 5k Calories or more a day. When I weighed twice as much as I do now, 5k/meal wasn't unheard of. That anyone can describe eating as hard baffles me.

For lunch I get a chocolate milkshake and avocado. Delicious. Nutritious?

Drop the login: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/login-walls/

Don't they? Or are you saying this site is a good example of doing that?

Our mobile app doesn't have the demo generator, which is maybe what he tried first? Something we might add in the future.

From a UX experience, I think you'd be more successful if you would let the user experience everything your site has to offer and if they decide to continue (or stay with the site, save their prefs and eventually - become paying customers) - give them an option to create an account, because according to the latest research in UX, any login walls (even the FREE account ones) are detrimental. Check the article I linked above.

The planner suggests some very peculiar meals, like eating a whole avocado as dinner, or pinapple+cottage cheese with a side of pinapple for lunch.

This is essentially the applied version of an xkcd comic titled 'Recipes': https://xkcd.com/720/

Haha oh man. One time we accidentally added a mostly vodka mixed drink to the public pool of recipes and it started appearing in people's breakfasts... that led to some interesting feedback emails.

Was something like the pinapple+cottage cheese with a side of pinapple the first result it gave you, or was that after a few regenerates? I'll have to do some investigating if it thought that was the #1 best result.

Definitely after a few regenerates. I was looking for degenerate cases. :)

This was a lot of fun but on my second set of options on mobile I got a sign up wall. I bounced. If I had played around more I almost certainly would have shared it to my girlfriend.

I like this idea but it’s a bit worrying to me that this company doesn’t seem to have a nutritionist on staff. Seems to me that’s a key missing element Of an otherwise great idea.

This is great! Now if only it could track what food I had in my house by scanning receipts, it could tell me what I could make right now! Looks like great execution.

Brilliant, love it. If only there were more vegan recipes

I doesn't allow you to select macronutrient breakdown. Selecting calories is all well and good, but I would like to also select the macro ratios

I don’t really want 2 protein smoothies and a spinach salad for lunch.

Or... 2 servings of banana almond butter with 2 servings of peanut butter and carrots.

Nice idea, needs work.

I know It has been made for us... But it's really strange to have a "mediterranean" diet with all breakfast only with eggs

Raw carrots and plain greek yogurt.

Does this thing even try?

Actually sounds like a pretty cool snack - I'll try that first thing next, thanks!

It wasn't even suggested as one meal.

Carrots were lunch and yogurt was part of the breakfast.

So by commenting some random stuff I made better choices than this app, haha

Thanks for the feedback! If you want more interesting recipes to choose from, try bumping up the meal complexity. We set most meals to "simple" by default because most people, when they feed themselves, aren't cooking every single meal of the day, and it's easier to stick to a meal plan and not get lazy when things are simpler.

That said, one of the main goals of the tool is to handle figuring out portioning for you. If you find you don't like any of our recipes, you can enter your own recipes and the generator will incorporate it into the plans.

Also, I'll probably bump up the default meal complexity right now since that seems to be a source of a lot of feedback in this thread.

This seems really cool, be nice if there was an option to localise units and currencies. Feels very US-centric.

I also recommend you to try the alternative, swole.me. Personally, I like the recommendations better.

How on Earth did we survive/evolve to this point without counting our calories/macros?

The stone age man must have been so obese and unhealthy without all this modern counting tools.

Or perhaps we need to count calories and macros because we are eating processed junk. Eating real food and your body responds correctly.

I find it sad that society has come to this level.

Just another result of everyone wanting everything faster, cheaper & easier. The greedy urge to get more profit drives companies to work against people.

The stone age man wasn't spending half a day sitting staring at a screen either and was probably more physically active overall...

Exactly, Stone Age man had to hunt his food and that meant hiking/hunting all day long until you found some game. And then there were days where you had to go a day or a few without eating anything other than some berries.

A priori that story seems right. But surely early man still had to survive Winter, so they actually would have had techniques to store and preserve foods (smoking, drying) and so would likely have picked a pile of berries/nuts and carried them to ration over the time spent hunting, or kept dried meat to hand? For sure you'd also have days where you'd eaten all the food, just as people do now.

Early man lived in places without winter

Equatorial regions still have seasons, wet-dry : I should perhaps have said non-growing season.

I mean early as in > c.8 kya.

Wikipedia suggests Scandinavia had hunter-fisher-gatherers about 11kya, I'm guessing they did preserving at least!?

Stone age man was probably on the verge of starvation quite regularly

No they werent. Hunter gatherers worked significantly less than we do now.

We were the most successful hunters in the history of the planet.

I want to be able to do 1 meal a day, but dinner instead of auto assuming breakfast.

Haha it keeps suggesting I eat 4 hard boiled eggs in the morning.... I'll pass

Today I'll be eating 6 portions of carrots, radishes for dinner

There should be an option to skip egg for vegetarian people...

There should be all sorts of options. I don’t eat fish so that basically puts me in the vegetarian or vegan categories even though I’m neither.

You can exclude just about any common specific ingredient, including eggs, fish and even specific kinds of fish.

I feel like the calculations could use a bit of tweaking.

Would be nice to suggest water intake too

SOYLENT, SOYLENT, SOYLENT, SOYLENT ...

This is amazing.

Christmas dinner with low fat

I highly recommend keto. If you eat fast carbs when your glycogen reserves are full your body will turn it to fat immediately leaving you feeling hungry again even though you met your caloric needs for the day. The natural response is to eat more leading to obesity. If you nail the keto diet you don't have to plan your meals and go hungry in between to stay in shape. You can eat whenever you feel like it. That does mean your only carbs come from veggies. The calories from fast carbs should be replaced with animal fat, not protein. If you eat too much protein it gets converted directly to sugar anyway and is harder on your kidneys. I lost dozens of pounds without going hungry (except for that initial fast carb addiction breaking) or counting calories.

> If you eat too much protein it gets converted directly to sugar anyway and is harder on your kidneys.

It is true that the process of gluconeogenesis can convert excess protein into glucose; however, I understand that it is very much an open question as to how much of the excess protein will actually be converted in an individual. For instance diabetics apparently experience a higher rate of protein catabolism due to insulin deficiencies than non-diabetics.

After rereading what I wrote I realize I made a mistake. It is about spiking your blood sugar which fast carbs do that leads to premature hunger. If you haven't filled your glycogen reserves you avoid the insulin spike, and if they are full the insulin spike is likely causing metabolic damage on top of the future needless hunger. Regarding the protein I swear I've seen low carb studies somewhere that did not improve diabetic conditions but they were all super high in protein. True moderate protein keto seems to be getting rid of at least pre diabetic conditions.

I use fitchef.nl. Weekly tailored menu with delivery integration of the biggest supermarket

Interesting, will check it out. Thanks!

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