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Comment by 27182818284 | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised and delighted by this site!

I cannot stress enough how well this nailed the contingencies that may come up when I was just using this. My first thought, I actually don't know how many calories I should eat--BAM there is a button that helps me generate it. What if I want to lose weight? BAM! Button for that option.

Then I see the meals generated and I think, well, I'm a vegetarian so this chicken won't work, but then BAM I see the vegetarian button.

You've got a real knack for thinking like your users.

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Haha awesome, thanks! I spent a lot of time trying to pander to different eating styles, and some definitely work better with my algorithm than others. Low carb is especially rocky since I have relatively few foods/recipes with absolutely no carbs.

How long has the service been around for, and how did you get traction? You have quite a lot of Twitter and Facebook followers/fans.

It started out as Swole.me (http://www.swole.me) a little over two years ago, and then I rebranded it once the algorithm was good enough to suggest things a normal, well adjusted person might eat (as opposed to a meal of 2 tbsp peanut butter + 1 chicken breast). My guess is that the idea and execution was novel enough to get it a decent amount of attention.

I had checked out Swole.me a couple months ago when I was looking to start lifting again and was looking for a way to get eating suggestions/tracking.

I found your site and it was really really awesome back then, I was impressed! I'm glad to see you're still working on it. I think you're hitting on something really valuable here.

Thank you for your work and good luck with it moving forward.

Wow, I was just thinking about swole.me the other day while I was mirin my gainz at the gym. Cool to see it become something more!

Going to the gym and running into buff dudes who were talking about swole.me was one of my proudest moments.

Nice pivot. I had the same idea myself about two years ago, and saw swole.me but thought it looked way to focussed on weight training users for a general audience. This looks much more widely useful.

Low carb doesn't mean no carb. If you limit meals to 5-10 grams of carbs or less, most low carbers would be happy. [1]

One of the more extreme low carb diets, the Atkins Induction Phase, allowed up to 20 grams per day. Other diets such as keto or The Zone allow 50-100 grams.

[1] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/how-many-carbohyd...

That's a bit of a misnomer: diets like Keto don't "allow" set amounts of carbs, they require you to find your own carb limit to stay in ketosis.

If you constantly blow out of ketosis, you'll literally accomplish nothing with the diet.

Hence why keto-stix and other indicators are important- no one value works for everyone.

I had to eat less than 25g/day to maintain the keto diet.

> If you constantly blow out of ketosis, you'll literally accomplish nothing with the diet.

Unless you also achieve a caloric deficit.

edit: opposite words day

I think we're in agreement. Every person is slightly different in how they react to carbs, including how bad your insulin resistance has gotten and quickly your insulin reacts to blood sugar. We all know its about stopping insulin from being released ultimately.

True, but it still limits the food variety a lot. Since my recipe database isn't huge to begin with, the meals start looking stale much sooner. I'm working on expanding the recipe database a lot, so hopefully it won't be a big problem for too much longer.

Perhaps you can rely on some crowdsourcing for that?

I can't speak for others, but try to keep my net carbs around 100g/day ... Would maybe want an option to set your daily limits (probably 100/day as a default)

That already seems to be there. I see a "target micronutrients" setting, which lets me set the min / max of carbs / fats / proteins for each day.

Actually, its well known that low-carb diets have limited food choices. For instance, in Tim Ferriss' Four-Hour Body book, he goes so far as to suggest you eat the same 3 meals every day. It actually makes it easier if you just repeat the same meals over and over and over.

But of course, "the same meal over and over" is counter to the purpose of your web site, which is to suggest new meals. Great job, and I wish you success!

+1 on Low carb isn't no carb. I had fantastic results on low carbs. I tried no carb once and it really will fk with your brain. Don't try no carbs!!!

> I tried no carb once and it really will fk with your brain.

Interesting. For how long?

I have seen people fast (i.e. no calories, but water and minerals etc) for two weeks, without too much messed up brains.

Aye

From what I've heard reported[1] about periods of extreme caloric restriction is that it takes the body around 4 days or so to start dealing with the lack of carbohydrates. Until that point the person feels tired, grumpy, headachy, out of sorts, hungry.

[1]act 2: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/259/t...

I've done extremely low carb diets a couple of times, and yes there is a 3-4 day period while your brain adjusts to running on ketones instead of glucose. Foggy brain for sure.

I had sort of the opposite experience: my preferences aren't possible to indicate in the interface at all. I don't have "formal" preferences: I don't really care whether something is lamb or beef or chicken or pork or whatever. And I'm not interested in fad diets like Keto or Scientology or Paleo.

Instead, I want my food to taste good while fitting into nutritional/budget constraints. What "tastes good" means varies, but in my case, I like generally strong-flavored foods, like spicy foods or garlicky foods.

There are a whole pile of ways to satisfy that. I like Greek food, I like Mexican food, I like Arab food, I like Indian food, and several other styles besides. But I don't like bland food. Most of what this tool generates is weird bland stuff, and I can't find any way to tell it to stop doing that.

Adding spices shouldn't change the nutritions too much. But I see what you mean---and I hope the author will take your comment to heart.

I've got a beta of a recipe search engine I've been working on that does exactly that. I can link you if you're interested.

Yeah, this is absolutely amazing.

papa_bear: if you integrated this with a service like Instacart, I can only imagine how much money you could make.

I think it depends.. instacart is SF based, and there are a lot more people in the world.

I had the exact same experience. Everything that was even remotely confusing had an explanatory link. How active am I? Link. What is 14% body fat? Link (to pictures!). That's great UX.

Was just about to write the same comment, but don't feel an upvote is enough. Great work on the ux, and the help texts answered my questions spot on.

Great job :)

Edit: And it remembered my entered values when i accidentally left the page!

Edit again: To add some constructive: I'm not to good at ounces, oz and cups, would it be possible to add an option for using the metric system?

At the top of the options page there's a checkbox for metric units. The next time you regenerate the meal plan, most things should be in metric units.

In the not sure button, after selecting "metric" It still talks about calories after clicking "calculate".

Can your please add "oz" and "cup" to your translate todo list? :-)

I agree! I had all those same reactions when I wanted different things. This site is actually super useful and friendly. Nice work :)

I also agree with other people's want for a like/don't like suggester. I know that takes a ton of work, but I would pay for a service that offers up recipes and mealplans for me based on my feedback.

How much body fat do I have? BAM an array of pictures to compare to. Simply fucking brilliant UX.

I'm going to send everyone I know to this site.

I registered especially to express that. Best Ux I'v ever had.

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