Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

eatthismuch.com

185 pointsbumbledraven105 comments

It told me I should eat a minimum of 118.99999999999999 grams of protein.

I may bill my customers in picodollars, but I don't eat food in femtograms...

Oof yeah, I've got some rounding errors pretty much throughout the app that I need to fix. Hopefully none in the payment system :) (thanks for that, stripe)

Funny that your UID is Papa_Bear.. and you are having difficulty finding a setting that is "just right"

I have a nutrition site I wrote for my own use (http://cookingspace.com/) that rounds amounts in a human-friendly way. Try changing the number of servings to see the effect.

Hey guys! I made the site and someone brought the post to my attention. I'm out right now and probably won't be able to reply to any comments tonight, but of course all of your feedback is incredibly valuable to me and I'll try to reply ASAP.

Great work man. I've always wondered why this didn't exist. Seems like a very good MVP. I will use it.

You need more foods to choose from, but I suppose that's where the users come in. Very interesting app! I might sign up.

Edit: Just found some of the features I had suggested, whoops.

My first few tries were wonky, but after adding more cooking time the suggestions came out GREAT!

Extremely well done! I've bookmarked it and will be back.

I intend to use this site regularly. Thank you.

I need a way to tell it that I want my calories to come from 60% carbs, 20% protein and 20% fat.

I also want it to include protein in every meal.

And as few simple carbs as possible. Fruit is fine-ish, but no processed sugar. Bread-like things should be limited to whole grain if at all possible.

How do I do that?

1. Click on Meal Options

2. Scroll down to Nutrition options

3. Change 'Target macronutrients...' to 'As a percent of calories'

Kind of a derail, but would you care to share the rationale behind the 60/20/20 macro ratio?

I exercise a lot -ish, with the goal of increasing my lean weight.

I need the carbs for energy so I can train, think and not sleep a lot. Because next to training, I also keep a somewhat busy freelancing schedule.

I need the protein for building muscle mass.

And I need the fat because fat burns in fat and you can't get leaner without consuming fat.

The idea is that you can't digest more than X amount of protein per day anyway (so 20% seems okay), you want fat, but too much fat will amke you fat (so 20% seems okay) and 60% carbs is pretty much what's left.

My biggest problem right now is that I don't eat enough carbs, but do eat too much fat. Protein is going pretty well.

Because here's the tricky part, once you let go of simple carbs (white flour, processed sugar etc.) it becomes really really really difficult to eat enough carbs. And a lot if not most of high protein foods (especially animal protein) are also high in fat.

For instance, an egg is something like 33% protein, 63% fat and 3% carbs.

PS: I got the 60-20-20 advice from Scooby -> http://scoobysworkshop.com/nutrition/

I'm not drinking 4 cups of whole milk for breakfast.

I'm probably never going to eat a cup of almonds and some celery for lunch...

I think you need to put some serious work into making sure that each suggestion is appetizing as opposed to rummaging through the pantry and finding something that technically meets the requirements.

There's a sliding scale for this sort of thing For instance: I would happily drink 4 cups (which sounds to me like approx 1litre ... I really dislike 'cup' measurements) of whole milk every morning

I would happily drink [a liter] of whole milk every morning

Same here, plus you could throw in some stevia & cocoa to make it chocolate milk without adding much extra energy.

Off topic for the thread but seeing as you highlighted it: isn't 'liter' the US spelling, while 'litre' is the (correct) UK one? (I'm in Ireland, and tend to cringe when I see 'Americanisms' :( )

Just because it's "litre" in the UK and "liter" in the US doesn't make one correct and one incorrect. The latter is the correct spelling in American English.

Wouldn't that amount of whole milk just make you vomit? (not an expert, just asking). Is there some trick to keeping it down?

It shouldn't, but it gets to be a lot of milk. Most people (that aren't dairy sensitive) could probably stomach a few more cups (8 fl oz.) without losing it, maybe up to 1/2 gallon. Throwing up usually happens when people try to drink a whole gallon in an hour type thing.

Agreed, I think cup is irrelevant outside of US - UK - AUS. Here it's just like saying drink "4 glasses of milk" - how much is this exactly? As usual it's a bit obnoxious to think your only customers / users come from those countries.

cup is basically irrelevant in the UK too.

Yes, apparently it's using celery to "round up" the values if it's "not there" yet and it needs some more calories.

Different people have different tastes, if you don't like it, you can hit the refresh meal button.

8 slices of bacon in a BLT (one of the suggested recipes)? Jesus! I knew Americans ate big portions but that's crazy!

1 slice of pan-fried bacon is under 50 calories. If that's the meat in my sandwich, yeah, I think 8 sounds pretty reasonable.

on the other hand, that's a lot of salt. nearly 200mg of sodium per slice. so yeah, if you are watching your sodium intake? probably a bad idea. But calorie-wise, completely reasonable.

You can limit the sodium intake on the options page

I'm assuming it's not talking about thick-cut bacon... that sounds just about right to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon#Australia_and_New_Zealand

We have different bacon to Americans.

I (the submitter) didn't make this, but it's a neat idea, nicely executed. You can set your own nutrient targets, such as, "I want at least 150 g of protein per day" or "I need between 50 and 100 g of carbohydrates", and avoid food groups such as grains (for paleo diets) or meat (for vegetarians).

Then why did you prepend "Show HN:" to the title? "Show HN:" is used to show off work that you've done. Otherwise every post would be a "Show HN:".

I thought "Show HN" was for links that went directly to a webapp, as opposed to an article. Thanks for the correction.

I would love the option to not constrain on calories, but (also?) on sugar and starch. This study found that cutting carbohydrates proves more effective than cutting calories in both lowering blood sugar and losing weight (losing weight is only a side note since the study is about diabetes): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090105175326.ht...

Low-carb diets do work very well for me, but choice of food is really restricted - at least at first sight. I'm sure there are more possibilities than the few I eat every week, and it would be cool if a tool like swole.me/eatthismuch could generate that for me (I read that Tim Ferriss will publish a cook book soon, but that's not the same) :)

I like it. It would be nice to be able to refresh the entire day's meal, I know you can hit generate again but I spent a minute looking for a "refresh all" button and I'm sure others might as well. Perhaps at the bottom after the user has scrolled down.

Another key (IMO) perhaps paid feature should be the ability to exclude ingredients.

I'm allergic to peanuts for example, plus plenty of people just outright dislike certain foods so it would be nice to save them the hassle and exclude them. Also the inverse of this, a favourite food option, would be really nice.

Edit: Just seen the food filter, this works for the exclude but a favourite food option might be good still.

If this could build a week at a time I would never stop using it.

Absolutely agree, but with one high-value request: If Monday needs half a lettuce, Tuesday needs to use the other half. By the end of the week I don't want a fridge full of leftovers.

The UI gets in the way of an interesting product. Nothing a little user testing couldn't solve, though!

I thought I'd suggest that you remove the underline from all of the lines at the top of the page, as it makes them all appear to be links and reduces readability. They will be just as prominent without that decoration, and it will actually make your sign up link more visible.

You may want to consider moving the sign up link to the entire phrase: "save your meal plans and make a grocery list ". People will probably click on that more often than the non-descriptive phrase "Sign Up". The latter phrase requires additional effort on the part of the user to read to text next to it, remember the sign up link, and make the decision to go back to the sign up link at the beginning of the phrase. It's worth a/b testing.

Interesting site!

For some reason the underline hadn't been showing up on my laptop and I had to check it out on my phone when you mentioned it to actually see it. Should be fixed now.

I've created an account. Saved a meal plan. Now I want to generate a grocery shopping list, but it appears you can only do that with a paid account. I've been looking for an app to do this for quite a while.

Could you post an example of what a generated shopping list looks like?

Edit: Thanks chrishas35

Looks like there are samples now available on the Registration page.

Sample Grocery List: https://www.eatthismuch.com/static_files/images/sample_groce... Sample Meal Plan: https://www.eatthismuch.com/static_files/images/sample_meal_...

For context, this is the next iteration of http://swole.me/.

It's a neat tool for getting a starting meal plan going, but some people have complained that the food variety is lacking. I can't eat only Greek yogurt for every meal.

I can't eat only Greek yogurt for every meal.

Interesting. What nutritional requirements did you enter to give that result?

In my current meal plan, on my workout days I minimalize fat intake and maximize carbs/protein in a 40/60 split - the calculator suggests Greek yogurt or fish chowder for nearly every meal. Obviously, this is more on the extreme end of diet planning and arguably I wouldn't have much of a use for it since I already have my own specialized plan.

I think it might just need more recipes. He added recipes fairly recently, and he's still building those up, so it might have limited options right now for cases with very specific constraints. Also, Greek yogurt is kind of a wonder food when you need high protein and low fat :-)

For reference, the "Generate" button does nothing on

    Firefox 2.0.0.11
    Debian 4.0
    Version: Eee PC 1.0.1
    Build Info: 2007-10-19 13:03

Yes, I know that's really old, but it's what I'm using on the road (for complicated reasons).

I'll try your app later on a rather more modern system - it looks interesting.

Added in edit: Now had a look - really good. Will investigate more later, but I can see why it won't work on older, less capable browsers. Still a shame, but understandable. Nice work.

When switching to metric (or perhaps as a separate setting, I'm not sure what European dietary reporting requirements are like), please change from calories to kilojoules. :-)

Hard (both in difficulty and must-have) requirement: ability to exclude foods high in Vitamin K.

A lot of us are on blood thinners (anti-coagulants, anti-clotting, Coumadin/warfarin). Vitamin K is the essence of blood clotting (coagulant, thickener); high quantity or wide variation can be dangerous (first symptom: stroke). Creating an interesting diet consistently very low in Vitamin K is important. Ability to specify "Vitamin K between X and Y micrograms/day" would be very helpful.

I also need to monitor my vitamin K because of blood thinner. As I mentioned in another thread, I wrote cookingspace.com for my own use just to learn how to estimate vitamine K in my diet.

To generalize from this very good point - perhaps a future iteration should include a fully-blinged-out "Advanced" settings menu that lets you add constraints for a wide variety of dietary restrictions, including micronutrient requirements, food allergies, and various modes of vegetarianism.

This is basically what I've started setting up for myself too. It's like recreating nutrisystem without the prepackaged foods. I love the idea, it needs more maturity though. Once the recipe database gets larger and there's more controls for foods and meals this will be a great tool.

I'd love the ability to save favorite meals (and to build them myself rather than randomly generate them) which would show up more often in my meal plans.

That said I created an account and will be using it.

I'd also love to be able to specify that I'm going to eat out for a meal and get suggestions for where to go and what to have.

Off to a good start. I like being able to lock items into a meal, pulling foods from the left menu, the food picker and the sliders for fats / carbs / protein. The presets for vegan, paleo, Atkins etc are handy but need some adjusting. The biggest thing is getting more recipes, especially for the different diet types. Also avoiding too much of one item, like nuts or bacon. Probably some more help / tips / hints would be useful for new users.

Great idea. I built something similar to this for myself. My company has a full cafeteria and Aramark (the co that runs our kitchen) posts the nutritional info on the web. Quick tool to scrape the nutritional information into a DB and it kicks me out a solid meal for the day everyday. I'm trying to incorporate a little logic so that it learns what my favorites are and adjusts its recommendations accordingly.

In the dialog for calculating one's calorie needs, one can input everything in metric, or everything in imperial units. I am 6'1" and 65 kg. I don't know my height in metric, and I don't know my weight in imperial, and I'd guess there are other people (in the Commonwealth) who are in a similar situation. Best to convert between the two instead of erasing when one switches between metric and imperial.

I have used http://www.gototaltrainer.com and it is really good. Not only do the meal plans they come up with perfectly within whatever constraints you set, you can also typically find recipes that are actually are enjoyable. It just seems like they have a pretty big database and a good algorithm to figure out the meal plan.

That site needs some serious work - I spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how to use it or get it to do anything before figuring out I had to contact them to try it out. No thanks.

This is so awesome, just really wish the recipe database was a lot bigger. As much as I love bacon, not sure I want it for 3 meals a day.

I absolutely LOVE this app. I'm very into fitness and getting recipes for my kind of diet can be pretty difficult. You definitely need to add some more recipes though as I keep getting a "simple fish chowder" for breakfast/meal 3/meal 4/meal 5 which is a little too much of the same thing.

Im looking forward to using this to track my macros.

I like the simplicity. Obviously your site can only get better. One thing that would interest me in upgrading to a paid account is the opportunity to select how much I'd would like to spend on the food itself, is there any way to take in to account local food prices? Keep it up!

If there is no automated price scrapping based on the local stores in your area, I think an averaged out "Walmart Price", or "Kmart price" would do just fine. I'm not too sure what the price difference is in Walmart stores across the US, but i'd guess it's not that bad.

I guess that if you notice that price databases to be lacking, you could get users to crowdsource it. Even if only serious power users would fill the numbers at first to make them more exact, it should get the ball rolling.

This would be the perfect tool for me and my friends if we could only change the macronutrient percentages (protein, fat, carbs) for the day and for each meal. Otherwise, great work. One of the coolest web apps I've seen in a while

You can change it for the day at the bottom of the "meal options" menu. Not yet for individual meals though

Couple of suggestions (I eat Paleo)

  * Corn is a grain (not a vegetable) 
  * Peanuts are legumes (not a nut) 
  * The Paleo preset needs to NOT include dairy products (eggs are OK), no fruit juice, no peanuts

The app gives the impression that it is only taking into account Fat, Protein, Carbs, and Calories. What about vitamins and minerals? Can it make sure that I'm getting enough Vitamin D?

Your app has a lot of potential! Nice use of Bootstrap too. Oerfect use case for Scrollspy.

It'd be nice if it allowed you to create a plan for a whole week. It could even give you a shopping list.

A service like this really needs rock-solid UX and this just isn't there yet. But this has enormous potential, and I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

Which parts need improvement?

A good start, but needs a way to distinguish between fat types (unsaturated/saturated/etc.). No way to minimize saturated fat consumption.

It's really cool to see how this site has matured over time. This is a huge leap forward from the first iteration of Swole.me

haha thanks james

Pretty cool. I was all ready to come up with some canned whine about no paleo options but there they are. Very nice.

Please add a setting to change measurements to metric globally, not just in the serving size but also the recipes.

Salmon & Potato Scramble for breakfast, what am i? The Queen?

But besides that, pretty nice idea! I also like the interface! :)

"Brie cheese on bread", "Hummus pocket sandwich" or "Goat cheese herb omelet". :)

Bit impractical imho. I think it needs a "staple" option (i would choose legumes for example, others rice or potatoes).

I'll add to the chorus of voices requesting the ability to add a price constraint.

Very nice and useful App. Please consider options for different metrics as well like KGs and Metres/CentiMeters.

Awesome idea! Wish you could set your current weight and your target weight you want to go down or up to.

You can, its just slightly hidden. Under the "I want to eat X calories in X meals" there is a "not sure?" button. Click that and it will help you generate a target number for your calories.

I'd love it if it could suggest your week's menu and then hook into your online grocery shopping too

How was this site built?

It looks nice, but orange and yogurt in the same meal?

This is well done, nice evolution of swole.me!

There is no vegetarian option?

There is. Look in the meal options.

Yep, it's in there!

From the fortune files:

    This is the first numerical problem I ever did.  It demonstrates the
    power of computers:

    Enter lots of data on calorie & nutritive content of foods.  Instruct
    the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a
    minimum level of each component, for fixed caloric content.  The
    results are that one should eat each day:

        1/2 chicken
        1 egg
        1 glass of skim milk
        27 heads of lettuce.
                -- Rev. Adrian Melott

This was our assignment for an AI class many years ago - take USDA and a GA with constraints set by users to generate meal plans.

I remember being told to eat a kilo of salt :)

That sounds like an insult. "Hey, buddy! Go eat a kilo of salt!"

I think I saw the similar story, but the requirement was to get the cheapest version. The result was 10 liters of vinegar, iirc.

I tried it and lunch was "2c. whole milk + .5c green beans" and dinner was fruit juice + potatoes.

Ah, computers.

just eat alkaline and you will be healthy

To be clear: No. This is wrong. Do not follow this advice. The 'alkaline diet' does not work.

http://www.skepdic.com/alkalinediet.html

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/coral2...

I have never understood diets like this. They don't make evolutionary sense. There's only one diet logically that is ideal in my opinion, and I'd like to call it the food diet. Eat food. Eat natural, unmodified food. If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it. It's worth making more frequent trips to the grocery store to buy food that's real than to eat the non-food additives that make other things stay longer.

Guaranteed, if everyone were to cut all non-food / modified food items from their diets, the only people that would be unhealthy would be those who have medical conditions. And we'd probably have way less of those too.

Oh, and none of this should negate the fact that eatthismuch.com is totally awesome. Keep it up!

> natural, unmodified food

ie whole foods, and yes this is pretty much the only dieting advise you need.

No. The only dieting advice you need is to keep your calorie content in a reasonable range (roughly equal to expenditure to maintain weight, less than expenditure to lose) and make sure you're getting enough nutrients.

It's possible to lose weight on a Twinkie diet. The person who did also improved his cholesterol levels: His LDL dropped, his HDL went up, and his triglycerides went down.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/06/health/la-he-fitness...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

I think it was Einstein who once said, "knowledge is not about what you've learned, it's about what you've managed to unlearn.". The old "calories in, calories out" adage is one of those things you have to unlearn, because as much as it seems to make sense, modern science has shown us that it's simply not true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5X0i92OZQ&feature=youtu...

most knowledgeable people disagree with him. for an intro look at his wikipage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lustig or i.e. http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...

Sure, some people disagree, but you'd be farfetched to find anybody in history who proposed a new way of thinking who didn't have people arguing against him.

Furthermore, something being "unproven" (which is what his Wiki says about his propositions) is very different from it being "disproven." Even the most brilliant scientific breakthroughs of our time were, at the time of their inception, unproven.

Whether or not you agree, I still highly recommend watching the whole video. It's rife with good material for discussion.

Your posts are not straightforward. Here's the wiki quote: "By contrast, such a conclusion has been deemed unwarranted by medical experts and not confirmed by clinical research. For example, in one meta-analysis giving evidence opposite to Lustig's opinion, fructose consumption actually reduced blood glucose levels with no effect on body weight."

It's not "some people" but instead the clear majority of nutrition researchers / specialists. Your argument about "unproven" vs "disproven" is a straw man. Having extensive meta studies that show no support for Lustigs thesis is as close to disprove something as it is possible to do so in nutrition discussions (even though most nutrition studies have major problems in their quality and samplesize quantity).

Further, in your original comment you wrote "modern science has shown us that it's simply not true." and your only support for this was the linking of Lustigs youtube-video (which, to say it nicely, is at least heavily contested). I agree with you that there are many open nutrition questions (and that it is important to keep an open mind for new concepts / ideas), but to postulate that science has shown that "calories in, calories out" is wrong, is untrue. I think this is definitely the wrong place to have an indepth discussion about the topic, but i just couldn't let your original statement stand by itself without a reply.

> modern science has shown us that it's simply not true

It's simple thermodynamics. It can't possibly be not true unless human bodies are magic.

Sure it's possible to lose weight on a Twinkie diet but who would actually recommend that instead of just plain, simple eating healthy through whole foods?

> who would actually recommend that instead of just plain, simple eating healthy through whole foods?

This sounds like the Naturalistic Fallacy, which is sadly common when it comes to discussing food.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adnature.html

It's also not entirely relevant, in that you're changing the topic: My whole point is that it's apparently possible to lose weight and improve your cholesterol on a Twinkie diet, not that it's necessarily desirable or anything else.

My larger point is that foods are not necessarily good or evil. Demonizing foods is idiotic. So is idolizing them. They must always be evaluated in context.

> If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it.

This is wrong. It's nonsense, because humans aren't magical. We need a certain amount of nutrients, which we know, and calories, which we also know, and beyond that, we're fine, with rare exceptions. Anything else is unproven.

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