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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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):
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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!
318 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadThen 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
There doesn't appear to be any way to delete my account.
To delete your account, click your username -> membership status -> delete account.
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.
Are you building this as a side gig? How many hours per week is going into it?
not sure how much I’ll use it with the holidays coming up :)
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!
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...
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
* 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.
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.
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.
You can also up the fat content with some creamer in your coffee rather than sugar.
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.
Imagine sitting next to a huge amount of any other kind of food all day!
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 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.
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.
>- 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.
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.
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!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIRurLnQ8oo
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.
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.
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...
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.
Also swear I've never heard of this in Australia :\ Make of that what you will.
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...
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...
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).
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.
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.
Peanut butter and Vegimite, and lots of butter.
https://www.marmite.co.uk/products/marmite-crunchy-peanut-bu...
Try using meso instead of vegimite / marmite.
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.
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...
I studied nutrition in a formal setting for four years, so I could detail some complaints, but I’d like to head yours first.
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).
i once looked at the almond butter label that I buy and it has a TON of calories!
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.
Hey, my 5 year old daughter loves that!
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 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’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.
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.
- Peanut butter + Nutella (add banana for bonus points)
- Peanut butter + chocolate sprinkles
- Strawberry jam + Gouda cheese
Put this on brioche bread... heaven!
A large Show HN in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640336
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.
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.
EX: This breakfast
The way it starts just adding more servings of things instead of more variety is a bit amusing- 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
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 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.
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.
Or... 2 servings of banana almond butter with 2 servings of peanut butter and carrots.
Nice idea, needs work.