Swole.me - The automatic diet planner | Hacker News Reader

Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

swole.me

152 pointsdwynings91 comments

Hey everyone, I made this site. It's very much a work in progress, though if your diet already looks as much like the generated output as it does mine, it will be a great tool! (i.e. eat whatever I can find that barely needs cooking, swallow a shot of olive oil, slight self hatred, etc.)

I would, however, like to learn to cook, so I'm working on implementing recipes and a better food selection (it's clearly not worth learning unless I build something to tell me what to eat and when). Let me know if you have any feedback, and thanks.

Great app, exactly what I needed.

I am worried about eating 6 eggs per day. Isn't there a risk of cholesterol?

Not unless you already have high cholesterol. For most people, cholesterol in your diet isn't much related to your blood cholesterol.

Eggs are probably the single best/healthiest food so eat away and enjoy. They're also delicious.

Great source of bio-available protein as well.

swap some of the eggs for egg whites, and make up a few calories else where, if you are really worried about cholesterol.

Thanks, will do.

It's very good, keep at refining it. I also think you're bang on with the UI layout. You're certainly onto something here. I'm sure you'll have a million little feature requests, perhaps you should use somewhere where people can vote on them. Here's mine: - Allow capping the fat intake for a day. - Metric units.

Nice! Hope you don't mind me sharing it with HN :)

You might want to look into using Punchfork's API for adding recipes. (http://punchfork.com/api)

Any chance on metric measurements? Does anyone use ounce as measurement except the US?

Yes, metric please.

In the FAQ it says: I used to, but I haven't had time to rework metric units to use the USDA food database. The metric measurements can currently be seen in the info tooltip next to each food.

But yes, I'd also like metric units.

Yup, vote up on the Metric Units for me too

Man, this is exactly what I needed and what I´ve been searching for. I even considered creating it myself. Awesome job!!

Seems like an excellent idea so far. A low-carb option would be good. Also, if the user ticks "gaining weight" you could tailor the results to reflect that, rather than a simple scale on calorie input.

Oh, and a kilojoule option.

If you click the Generator Options button you can customize the ratio of carbs, proteins and fats.

I love it so far. I'm a fit/skinny guy and never been particularly sure on what to eat (I'm ignorant of calories so the 'Not sure' button was brilliant) and your site has been useful.

Tie-ins with recipes and what not would be great. Do you plan monetising it somehow?

The "Not sure" suggested what I think were too many calories for me, even though I chose "Sedentary" in my lifestyle.

Maybe I should have put in my target weight instead of my current weight? (I'm 20 kgs overweight, which according to health statistics is in Obesity type 1 territory)

Here's my request: please add Dr. Furhman's eat-to-live diet as one of the options.

This is a really fantastic idea. Especially for people who have issues with eating, I would love to sit down and use this site with them and show them how to get the proper amount of food.

(1) It needs tweaking for vegetarians/vegans. (2) My 'breakfast' for 1400 calories had 6 eggs and 1 apple, that's a whole lot of eggs for one meal.

Love the idea. Please keep working on it.

Fantastic idea. But one suggestion: - remove the requirement for a 5 character or greater username please!

Just donated $20 via PayPal to make it happen sooner ;)

Thanks! I'll poke around my barely existing backend to see what I can do.

The potential is amazing!

Kinks: I unselected all the meat and it told me to have 8oz of steak, 6oz chicken breast, and 8oz of dark meats for breakfast!

A great way to start the day if you're a caveman!

Thanks! It's a bit confusing, but there's a separate breakfast menu. If you click any of the presets, it changes all of the breakfast menu foods too which isn't quite obvious yet.

This is great! I once tried to do something like this but gave up because of all the potential complexities. It looks like you have many of them covered. This has a lot of potential if you expand it to "real world" living. A few suggestions:

  - ability to create and save custom templates of choices (beyond Atkins...)
  - "ALL" toggle for each food group
  - database of commercial groceries (Heinz baked beans)
  - database of restaurant menus (Big Mac)
  - templates of meal types beyond "breakfast" (post workout, TV snack)
  - fix breakfast option (seems to ignore when chosen)
  - seasonal menus for produce
  - a way to cook meals for multiple people with their own preferences
  - Natural Hygiene (Fit for Life, Fuhrman) template
  - consider pricing
  - micronutrients beyond carbs, protein, fats
  - consider allergies
  - raw options
  - notifications (email, text, msg)
  - historic reporting with suggestions (especially daily calories)

Best wishes for a great product. Please keep us posted.

Would be nice to have a vegetarian / vegan option which quickly checks / unchecks various things.

As a vege in one day I need to eat a lot of eggs and drink a lot of milk.

6 Eggs + 1 Cup Egg Whites + 3 Cups of Milk

I wonder how to make a meal out of this:

2 eggs Eggs + 1 cup Lentils + 30 grams Protein Powder + 1 cup Strawberries

I think it has potential though. Will be good when there are recipes.

Omelet, humus (with a bit of pita bread), and drink the protein powder with the strawberries in a smoothie.

+1 for the ability to select only vegan options.

What a nice surprise! This is my brother's site. :-)

If you don't fancy eating lots of eggs, etc, you can go to the sandbox mode and play around with combinations. He's planning on adding recipes soon.

Yes I was recommended 8 eggs for breakfast!

Time for costco. Seriously, though, eggs are awesome.

Me 6. This is so unhealthy by the way, the yellow part contains far too much cholesterol to be eaten on a daily basis.

edit: Seriously? I'm not trolling, ask any dietetic guy if he thinks it's healthy eating that much eggs everyday.

Not true: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776466

You can always change the foods it's allowed to use, though, just hit the Choose Foods button.

Good link. There's plenty more (in pubmed) where that came from!

Seriously this 1980s alarmism needs to stop.

I agree you shouldn't have been downvoted for that. In my opinion, there's far too much downvoting going on at the moment on HN. People should remember that it's only a way to express that you feel a post is inappropriate to the discussion, not that you disagree with the sentiments of the post.

This site is the second google result for swole, after the urban dictionary definition of the term. I honestly don't like the name, and I think for most people who have never heard the term this will bring to mind "swollen", not "buff". Not a good word association for a diet planner.

You might not be representative of the target market.

I like the site, but I also don't like the name. It has some pretty "bro"-esque connotations. It might turn away some of your desired audience.

I feel mostly the same way, and I've spent a lot of time looking for a new one so I'm open to suggestions. I managed to scoop up dietcal.com and mealgorithm.com, and though I'm really into mealgorithm it seems a bit too complicated.

For dinner, it says I should have quinoa, wild rice, and chickpeas. I think it would be more appetizing if it did its calculations on a recipe basis -- so you'd get a menu plan composed of recipes selected to meet the given requirements.

Even though I have all eggs and dairy unchecked, it still tells me to eat 6 eggs for breakfast.

I also take umbrage to the trend of confusing foods with macronutrients (spinach is not carbs, meat is not protein, etc). http://www.foodpolitics.com/2012/01/peevish-about-protein/

It told me I should eat a cup of avocado and 2 cups of skim milk for dinner. I'm confused and rather appalled by the thought of having that for any meal.

Additionally, I've heard stories of it telling people to eat 8 eggs for breakfast, so I'm a bit wary.

(No, the 8 eggs for breakfast was not a diet for Gaston, either)

I was told to eat 6 eggs for breakfast + yogurt (and banana?) as part of a 4 meal/2000 cal plan. I love eggs... but six?! That's just crazy talk.

Well, to quote Gaston:

"When I was a lad I ate four dozen eggs, every morning to help me get large"

There are several comments here regarding the egg debate. Should you avoid eating too many eggs? What is the impact of eggs and other sources of dietary cholesterol on your blood cholesterol levels?

I've been wondering about this myself for some time, all the while eating cartons of egg whites for breakfast every day.

ericd posted a link[1], which appears to be a good source of information (far more than I have time to digest right now).

I only want to point out one small tidbit that I just found[2]; the American Heart Association (according to the webmd article) recommends keeping your dietary cholesterol intake below 300 milligrams per day. The same article reports that a chicken egg contains about 200 milligrams of it.

Now, I'm totally agnostic about things that I don't have time to properly research. In this case I would rather err on the side of caution, and will continue to limit my cholesterol intake.

That said, this app is nice if you enjoy eating this way (a bit of this and a bit of that; sans-recipe). This is pretty much how I normally eat, except that I never measure my portions.

A nice (premium?) feature might be a journal where you can easily record what you actually ate (in so much as it differs from the generated plan), your weight, etc.

I don't know, but maybe with enough journal data you could infer something about the user's metabolism (and average plan adherence), and make predictions about weight change.

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776466 2. http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/cholesterol-food

Your body makes most of the cholesterol in you, it's a vital pre-hormone.

How much you eat barely changes the amount produced by your body.

If you want a better lipid profile, eat more eggs and fewer carbs.

Everything above is really well established fact at this point, propagandists like AHA to the contrary.

When in doubt, ask the practitioners, at say, leangains.com

Yeah. Put another way, the USDA makes all sorts of really stupid recommendations that should be viewed with skepticism. The food pyramid, for example, is totally off.

The AHA is probably exercising risk management. While dietary cholesterol doesn't affect blood cholesterol for most people, for some people (hyper-responders) it does raise blood cholesterol. Which is a bad thing.

So rather than saying "for most people it's OK, but be sure to get some fiddly blood work done a few times!", the AHA just says "don't do it, in case you're a hyper-responder".

The studies regarding eggs and cholesterol compare the effects of eating one or two eggs per day to the effects of eating none. There is not much difference between the two diets being compared. There are no studies that compare the effects of an egg free diet to the effects of eating 6-12 eggs per day. If you are eating a bodybuilder diet it's worth getting a metabolic panel to get an idea of what's happening inside.

When clicking on the "not sure" link to determine how many calories we want per day, one is given a choice between Imperial and Metric units; but in the generated diets this choice is apparently not present?

(Also, what is a "cup"? and how many avocados does it hold...?)

1 cup = 236 ml. According to Wolfram Alpha, an avocado has a density of 0.97 g/ml, so it's roughly 229 grams. Average weight of an avocado is 210 grams.

It's 1 avocado.

It recommended that I have 1 cup of avocado and 1 cup of cottage cheese for lunch. No thanks.

I saw this a few months back on r/fitness - nice progress!

I'm curious about your tech stack. Mind sharing? :)

I too would like to know more.

It's currently all javascript/jquery and PHP, though I'm moving the backend to Django. I'm also messing around with backbone.js, but haven't been able to push myself to make the switch yet.

What about the design?

At first I was like, yawn...another recipe site...then I tried it. This is awesome! From the pie charts to the info popups, it's clear you've polished this a fair bit.

There's so much more that can be done with this good luck and keep at it!

Like the idea and site. Issues I had:

I signed up. Thank you for making signup and logging in easy. However, I was then presented with this page:

http://swole.me/account.php

However, this page (logged in, mind you):

http://swole.me/

Would have been better, at least on the initial log in.

The Not Sure? button got lost. I didn't notice it. In fact, I'd written out a suggestion for you to do the exact thing you did with the popup and calculator. Maybe change the text to "Figure out how many calories you need" or something like that. Something more accurate.

Overall though, a great start.

Very nice!

Any plans for a mobile version? (iPhone / Android) I can imagine this has even more value when you have it around all the time on your mobile, combined with push notifications?

Good luck with the app!

Thanks! I'd definitely like to at some point. What did you have in mind for the push notifications? "4pm. Eat some nuts!"?

Indeed, something like that would be awesome.. reminders in general! :)

As a huge fan of swole.me and long-time lurker of it - you could add in push notifications right now using Boxcar (boxcar.io). Disclosure: I helped build it. ;)

zomg this is awesome! :D

I was actually about to start building something really similar to this. basically the recipe part your blog mentions- you'd throw in everything you have in your kitchen and it'd spit out stuff you can make with it.

but yeah I've been in the eating healthier / start cooking more mood recently, but also starting to be more active, so I wanted to make sure I was getting everything I needed. Calculating all of the nutrients/vitamins/minerals by hand sucks!

tldr- this app is awesome. good luck with it :)

To be clear, I didn't make it – just found it!

Gojee.com also does something similar.

As a competitive cyclist, this is pretty awesome.

Less thinking about what I need to eat and more eating. Huge time saver.

How much science is behind this? It'd be nice to see some kind of "weekly exercise level" worked into this, with some suggested on-day/off-day caloric intake recommendations PLUS the actual food bit.

EDIT: Just read deeper into how it's deriving the numbers. Top-notch. Hoping I can work this into my daily routine. A "weekly grocery list" option would be sweet.

Just a quick reminder for some, a diet as a means to an end very well may have a strange set of meals in order to meet the criteria for weight loss/mass gain. As nice as it'd be to eat 2000kcals and have a steak and potatoes for dinner everyday, you may instead have to eat that cup of avocado and a glass of milk for its nutritional value:kcal

Awesome app! This is going straight onto my bookmarks bar.

Only thing I can think of adding straight off is a button to copy your menu selections to the other side. If I tweak the menu settings for breakfast, I have to re-tweak them the same way for the other meals.

Awesome, I'm totally going to use this - I hate diet sites that don't let me easily configure what I have on hand, or want to eat. "No, cottage cheese is not a good idea when you are lactose intolerant, thanks."

I like the site.

I would like to see multiple options for each element of a meal, in the interest of not eating the same meal each day.

For instance:

  chicken breast or ground beef
  
  wild rice or baked potato

Good work!

The recommended meal (4 eggs, 12 oz chicken breast) gives me 1100mg of cholesterol, which is more than 3 times the daily recommended maximum.

Great for Pfitzer (makers of Lipitor), not so great for your heart.

The HDL/LDL ratio of eggs are even, and your body creates cholesterol if you don't eat any, and reduces it's cholesterol production if you do to compensate.

Damn, I was thinking about building something like this. But seriously, it looks very cool. Looking forward to playing with it.

It told me that I need to be on the skim milk diet.... Too bad it can't be used in conjunction with the cookie diet...

Let us add custom foods. I have these %50 fat and %50 protein cheese sticks at work that make awesome keto snacks.

Meal 4: 1 cup Cottage Cheese

So for dinner I'm having 1 cup of cottage cheese? Not very original, how about an actual cooked meal?

Needs a little refinement. It's suggesting I eat 6 eggs a day and while I am no expert, that sounds excessive.

The whole cholesterol in eggs thing is actually not really that big a deal: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776466 (basically says that dietary cholesterol intake levels are unlinked from blood cholesterol in 75% of the population, and that it has been shown to inhibit atherogenesis/artery plaque formation)

Besides that, since they're made to carry something from a bundle of cells to full organism, they're chock full of a full set of micro and macronutrients.

This started as a site for body builders, though, and it's only now broadening to normal foods.

I really like the "raw" body-builder flavor to it: eat a cup of kale, eat a cup of almonds etc., so I hope if recipes do come in, they can somehow be turned off.

I just recommended it to reddit.com/r/leangains :-) though apparently it's been posted on /r/fitness before.

I eat a 6 egg, mushrooms, and bell peppers omelet for breakfast topped with salsa. I highly recommend it. I feel much better than the days I have oatmeal for breakfast. And it takes less than 5 minutes to prepare.

Geez, a six egg omelet seems like it would be a ton of food to get through.

Not really. There's weight gain diets that involve a dozen - 'DEAD' or dozen eggs a day.

Besides, this is just one meal plan - you should be running it with your settings every day or so to get new meal plans.

Let me blacklist specific foods!

You can, hit the Choose Foods button.

I loved the Paleo button. Made it a lot easier to get started!

Love it. Have not signed up, please offer OpenID...

the name is kinda bad

kinda says swollen, which would implicate that you actually get fatter.

Swole means muscular, which for many is a good thing.

I'm guessing the name is a play on 'swoll', which colloquially means 'muscular'.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swoll

I feel slightly the same way, but after a few hours of searching for a new name with no luck, I always end up feeling better about swole.me :) I'm definitely open to suggestions, so PM me if you have them.

this site eats 100% CPU in chrome

I'm running the latest (16.0.912.77) on Mac OS X, and not seeing any issue. It does jump to about 25% CPU when I click 'Generate', but only for about a second.

Slow Carb Diet , representing

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