Show HN: iPhone App to help you stick to the Paleo Diet | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: iPhone App to help you stick to the Paleo Diet

paleoviz.com

18 pointsloumf15 comments

From my experience, if you are doing the paleo "diet" right, you don't need help sticking to it.

But any help is appreciated when you are starting it.

It helped me a lot to journal. When I do, I'm much more strict. This has been a finding generally with lots of habits.

I tried to make the app specific to paleo because the journaling opens up possibilities if I know the domain of the journal.

So is this app about sharing or tracking?

The tagline is "PaleoViz helps you keep to a Paleo diet by giving you an easy way to track your meals"

But, the later the real benefit seems to be "share great paleo meals with friends."

Which is it?

This version is mostly tracking with twitter for sharing. I am building out a backend for sharing right now.

I intend the app to be hired for two jobs: motivation in sticking to the diet and recommending paleo meals. Tracking and sharing are the features that will help me do that.

Since, at a minimum, I need you to track, I tried to make an app where tracking would be encouraged and easy (still plenty of room for improvement, but that's my intention)

I'm on paleo atm, but I don't have an iPhone, so I can't test this out. I don't understand what this app is supposed to do - is the word "paleo" completely arbirary in this case?

I can't see any way in which exchanging the word "paleo" for "vegan" or "gluten free" wouldn't make it the same product. Is this just a generic food journal, or is there anything that specifically makes it "paleo"?

It does look nicely presented (except for that awful iOS date picker thing).

The future of the app is journal sharing. To prepare for that it helps to build a homogenous user base.

Also, I have more Paleo features coming. There will be a paleo food starter DB and other features that will differentiate it from generic apps.

Gotcha - so the plan is to make it social, and you need to build a paleo user base.

I don't know if you have this in mind, but some features around food intolerances could be useful. For instance, I can't eat tomatoes - so I spend a lot of time sifting through paleo recipes to get rid of ones that don't have tomatoes (or the various other things I can't eat). I suspect that many other paleo eaters are in a similar situation.

Not sure how easy that will be though, as it can be hard to link various forms of the food that you are intolerant to.

Good luck with this, it looks promising. If you have a list, let me if you ever decide to make an android/webapp/windows/linux version.

Thanks for the suggestion. I agree that it's part of paleo culture to be careful with intolerances, so I would want to support that if I could figure out how.

Does the app tell me if a food I'm eating is Paleo or not? Say I plug in "beef", it'll tell me yes, it's Paleo. if I plug in "Skittles" it'll say no. That'd be tremendously useful, as there are already tons of tracking apps out there.

The problem with that is there's different definitions of paleo, depending on who you follow and how strict you are.

Dairy and legumes are examples of paleo diet foods that are borderline and depend on who you talk to.

Exactly. I intend the ratings to be your personal standard. Later I'll have ways for you to use your own data, and optionally, shared data.

This makes it hard for you to "stick" to it. What if my personal standards on Sunday include candy? If you're going to do this, you should have a preference pane for people to select what foods they want to allow and what they don't before they start and then track them on their individual progress. However, if you start doing that, you've nixed the whole "paleo niche."

Right, the app doesnt have to give a Yes or No answer. There could be a it depends as well. It'll still be useful.

The idea is that as you track and rate, your personal data will be the best thing to base these features on.

That's not in yet, but that's he plan. This is a 1.0 to get you tracking.

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