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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Hopefully soon! I've talked to a few recipe sites and none have been interested in collaborating directly. I might try to add an option to let users scrape a recipe directly via a url, but I'm not 100% sure about the legality of it.
Thank you for charging for this service. I am tired of sites that turn the user into the product, and will gladly pay $9/month for this if it will make eating easier and simpler (and help me become healthier).
K this app is something i've been thinking about making because I really want it. So feel free to charge me money if it means you can spend more time adding cool features.
here's what i'd like:
* You generate about 90% stuff alright, but that extra 10% is hard, I found myself hitting refresh many times. Can you give me a netflix style like it or not which will try to make better guesses?
* Can you hook it in with fit bit? They've already automated a lot of the information you're asking for. It might be nice to receive an email "Hey you didn't meet your daily goal, maybe this would be a better dinner than the one you planned"
* I'm not sure if i saw this or not, can you plan a week ahead so I can shop on weekends.
* I'd like an API, so I can add my own cool things. For instance on days where I have a lot of meetings I'm usually too exhausted to cook. So i'd like to plan easier meals.
In the signup process, you can set any day of the week to be your grocery shopping day. It'll send you the email the day before in case you want to make any edits, and then the meal plans start the day after.
Thanks for the suggestions! There's a lot I want to do with more intelligent recipe suggestions based on food taste, and hopefully I'll get around to it within a few months. Same for the fit bit stuff - there's a lot I can work on to make the whole thing more reactive to your daily activity.
You can plan a week ahead as a subscriber - the site will automatically send you 7 meal plans and a grocery list the day before your grocery shopping day, whatever you set that to be. And I may work on an API if I have time, but you can enter your own custom foods and recipes if you sign up. I don't make if obvious, but if you sign up and bail out after the email/password step, you can still use a basic free account to enter recipes and foods and things.
As others have noted the UX is quite intuitive. You should definitely add more low carb options. Perhaps pairing this up with simple workouts (walk 3 miles), to allow more calorie intake but maintain the overall daily goals.
No, it's a commonly unbalanced US meal. (and is ~1.5 people's worth of calories.) But it doesn' seem do different from your example: meat, vegetable, dairy, starch, sweet.
And the Nutrition guide's recommended protein level is insanely high.
Well in my example, you get 2 servings of vegetable and 2 servings of fruit a day (with potentially 1 or 2 more for breakfast + snack)– here we barely have 2 portions of fruit/vegetable.
My culture and upbringing have given me broad indications on what consists "eating healthily"; here I am seeing a tool made by a citizen of another culture, that claims it will produce healthy meal recommendations.
But the recommendations it gives me are wildly different from my cultural expectations.
All I'm trying to do is understand why there is this discrepancy.
This is a pretty interesting question IMO. I spent 8 years living in Spain where people are convinced that their diet is the healthiest in the world, but by any "modern" standard is a nutritionist's nightmare: often no breakfast and fatty/sugary if you do eat it, tons of coffee, generally extremely high levels of fat including saturated animal fats, very high in salt and alcohol. Nearly all carbs are white and processed, very few vegetables. Breakfast, if eaten, is normally 10am, lunch at 2pm-4pm, and dinner at 9pm-10pm. No-one sleeps 8 hours.
That said, it does have some remediating factors - generally lots of fish and olive oil and (much) smaller portion sizes than the US. Also my cardiologist here in New Zealand said that they have a much lower incidence of heart disease than you would expect given the above, and no-one knows why. Maybe it's genetic, maybe olive oil is better for us than we currently understand.
It's also likely that different environments (sun exposure; humidity; food availability; water availability) have contributed to cultural traditions. That may or may not factor into genetic traits.
Because you didn't have enough confounding variables already. :P
33% of calories from fat means less than 33% by weight, since it's more calorie dense, and I actually don't doubt that they eat that much. If you've never cooked much French cuisine, there are a lot of cream based sauces...
The site had a nice breakfast suggestion for me: ‘Tofu Scramble’, containing: tofu (14g fat), vegetable oil (14g fat), dijon mustard and low-fat milk. The dish contains 400 kcalories, 260 of those are from fats (that’s 65 percent!).
I don't want to speak for the site creator, but that seems fine for me as long as other parts of the diet balance it out. Contrary to common American nutritional wisdom, fats are not the root of all evil.
I agree wholeheartedly. My point was that 33% of fats in your diet isn’t hard to accomplish. Also, as far as ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ fats go, aforementioned recipe did quite alright. It’s transfat and saturated fats you have to watch — fat in and of itself is needed for our bodies to function.
However, I wouldn't just eat Tofu Scramble for breakfast. I need complex carbs not to feel hungry soon after. I can do without carbs for dinner, but not for breakfast or lunch. A typical breakfast for me consists of 0% fat Greek yogurt, mixed with oats, linseed, nuts and fresh fruit. That still has plenty of fats, but also carbs.
It’s not so much about feeling satiated, I can be satisfied with just a simple green salad. I choose oats and flax for breakfast because they have a low glycemic index (GI), which means they’re turned into energy over a longer period of time, keeping me from feeling hungry longer.
But yeah, it would be good if the site would take the GI index of ingredients into account.
‘Moderately active’ may not mean what you think it does. Farmers and professional athletes are ’moderately active’. People who work at home all day using a computer are ‘sedentary’.
(Given your gender, age, height and weight:) Unless you work out for >4 hours every day, 3500 kcalories is way more than your body uses, so you’re sure to gain weight if you were to ingest that many calories every day. If you have a desk job or if you’re a student, choose ‘sedentary’ in the app. The result will be 2300 kcalories, which is most likely enough for you. On days in which you workout a lot, you can ingest a few hundred kcalories more.
To add to what Samuel_Michon wrote, I'm 38, 103kg at the moment (I'm substantially above averagely muscular, but also somewhat overweight now), 1m 85, and I exercise hard 5 days a week - 1 hour of heavy weights 3-4 times/week, and cardio the rest. I work in an office, so my work day is fairly sedentary. I also have a young son which keeps me more active than I've ever been before during the evenings.
I burn ~2800 kcal/day when I exercise.
This is an estimate based on tracking every meal, and tracking my weight every morning, rather than what I "should" be burning.
Unless you have a very active job, or exercise hard (think stumbling out of the gym) for substantially more than an hour a day, or spend every moment of your spare time being highly active, you're likely not burning 3400 calories.
But really, write down what you eat for a couple of weeks, count the calories, track your weight, then adjust the number of calories to target up/down depending on whether you want to increase/decrease your weight, as there are so many factors that can change what how much you need.
Also, contrary to what you might think, even spending an hour per day in the gym weight lifting is not burning a lot of calories. It won't take you from 2300 calories expended per day to 3400, for instance.
One hour of weight training for a 200 lb man is only 450 calories burned, or a Medium Fries at McDonalds. You have to really be running or other high cardio sports to burn even 1000 calories per hour.
Working out has also been shown to cause people to eat more subconsciously, so those 450 calories burned end up being only 100-200 net calories burned once you've had the protein shake after the hard workout.
How is that a "French" meal? You can eat those types of foods anywhere... I have had many meals that look exactly like that here in the U.S., both cooked at home and out at restaurants.
Don't believe what you read on Reddit, HN, and other websites that hate Americans. Not all Americans eat McDonald's burgers and fries and other crappy processed food for every meal. We are just like anyone else. Some of us (not all) are healthy and eat very balanced and healthy meals, and some of us are in very good shape physically. On the other hand.... some other Americans (not all) are obese, unhealthy, eat bad food. It's a mixture. Not every American is the same. And there is not one "typical American meal" in my opinion.
Of course not every single American eats the same. But, probably the best reflection of the "average" American diet is via "mainstream" restaurants (i.e. chains, but not fast food).
Look at places like Chili's, Friday's, Ruby Tuesday, and (gasp) Cheesecake Factory. Their portions are out of control and they are laden with fat and sodium. It is not unusual for a single meal at those places to nearly meet or exceed one's allowance of, calories, etc., for an entire day. And some meals (ex. Just about every entree at Cheesecake) are cartoonishly huge.
It's ridiculous. But, I think that defines the "average" American diet in the sense that these guys are all targeting the mass market. So, what they serve is the product of much research into what people want, and then is constantly being tweaked based on observation.
Let me get this straight: you are looking for healthy, sensible meals at a place called THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY. Are you serious? Read that again and think about it: the name of the place is The Cheesecake Factory. You're trying to say that this restaurant is representative of a person's overall diet in the U.S.? Completely ignoring any other options that offer healthy food? Completely ignoring cooking at home? Completely ignoring the plethora of farmer's markets, grocery stores with amazing fresh produce and lean meats, the growing popularity of the Whole Foods and similar stores throughout the country?
Oh, I see, you don't like to think about these things, because it goes against the "AMERICA IS HORRIBLE" narrative that is so popular on the internet.
"Not all Americans eat McDonald's burgers and fries and other crappy processed food for every meal. We are just like anyone else. "
I'm sorry, but the food here in the US is ABSURD. Aside from burgers and fries, there are few places that one can get an _affordable_ healthy meal. Two things jump out at me here: the portions and sodium.
In order to remain somewhat healthy, you have to cook or actively go out of your way and purchase food that turns out to cost more. "It's a mixture." does not accurately describe the US - I do believe it's off-balance here; more folks do consume such food.
I'm originally from Hong Kong, which gives me a slightly different perpective than most, but everything that I eat out in the east: tastes amazing, can be extremely affordable, doesn't make me feel bloated or 'full' when I'm done and is absolutely incredible.
So you eat all that twice a day, plus breakfast, plus sometimes seconds of the main? As a Canadian that looks like WAY too much food. Here it would be more common to eat one serving of what you call the main course (where veggies may be replaced by the salad), plus maybe an appetizer/fruit/bread. Desserts usually only special occasions or when you go out to a restaurant.
I wouldn't say that France has a reputation for eating healthy (and no wonder, sheesh), more a reputation for "gourmet" food. Personally I found that the site gave a fairly sane meal plan for a sane calorie range. Whether the site generated it for you or not, surely you realized 3500 kcal is not a sustainable amount for a sedentary person to eat?
The algorithm primarily targets the nutrition constraints that you ask for, with only a few other rules about how meals should be structured. It makes more realistic looking plans (I feel) at lower calorie values, but you're right that the meal plan you posted doesn't look great. It would probably suggest more fruits and vegetables if I required all of the necessary vitamins and minerals to be constraints, but in the interest of algorithm speed, I mostly suggest adding a multivitamin to your diet :-) Definitely not ideal, but adding a few vegetables on your own shouldn't change the nutrition too much if you're watching your calories.
I actually built the first version of the site to make it easier for me to gain weight, and my strategy now is to lock a few cups of whole milk into each meal and then tell it to generate around it, giving me much less to cook.
As far as what I asked for, as I replied to another commenter[1], I let the website decide what my caloric intake should be, and I selected "stay at my current weight".
Those meals are unreasonable, but it's because you're asking for an unreasonable amount of calories, apparently. The tool can help you calculate your calories (very intelligently, I might add).
So I started developing something remarkably similar about 4 years ago (in Django, too!). Wrote up a business plan with monetization, p&l, etc. I brought the plan and prototype to a few seed folks for early funding before I admittedly lost interest and moved onto something else.
The hardest technical challenge I had was, knowing there would need to be a ton of recipes in the system to make it truly effective, I had to do an automated intake of recipes from many places. But ingredient normalization got in the way, even with really good regex/etl practices. For instance, a recipe says, "boneless skinless chicken breast".. another says, "skinless boneless chicken breast". Some list the # of breasts. Some list pounds. Some mean the breast is split, some don't. But in order for the nutrition info to be accurate, the normalization process had to be near perfect.
I ended up "buying" the source code to "recipefox" a recipe parsing plugin for firefox (for $100 or something like that) which helped tremendously, but still wasn't good enough for my tastes. I felt like to make it all work, i needed to essentially build a recipe ETL.
The monetization was kind of cool, I felt. Free for users. I felt that companies (food companies, supermarkets, etc) would put coupons for specific brands or specific stores on printed-out shopping lists based on the weekly recipes. i actually got alot of interest from that one from actual supermarkets. Thought that was cool.
Good luck with this. It was a tremendous idea 4 years ago and I always wondered when someone else was going to do it because it just seemed so damn obvious to me.
"I have a gluten free child and a wife on a diet. What should I buy at the grocery store this week and what the hell should I make?"
You're totally right about the pains with ingredients normalization - I've spent at least two months making scripts to scrape recipes, and it will only match the ingredients accurately about 80% of the time, leaving a lot of work in hand curating everything it scrapes. I ended up trying to promote users to enter recipes by offering a month free every time they entered 5 good recipes. I built up a decent recipe database this way, but it does need to be much larger to better target people's tastes.
And I'd love to do the grocery store monetization idea, but trying to form partnerships with the grocery chains always seemed like a daunting time commitment. Maybe I'll send out some feelers this week.
Yeah, my ratio was about 80% and given the volume of recipes I wanted, that wasn't good enough. So I started coding an normalization solution that would highlight questionable recipes and make it easy to reformat them with structured data, but even that was really hard. It was honestly around that time that I lost interest and ditched the project.
I saw it on HN a couple weeks ago and it's basically one big project to scrape and index food blog recipes. It doesn't include preparation instructions but it uses schema.org's recipe format, which includes ingredients and other useful things: http://schema.org/Recipe
The servers are getting hammered right now! If you sign up, the automatic weekly planner starts running right away to make a week of meal plans for you, but it's running very slowly at the moment - sorry about that, and if you give it a couple minutes, it should send you an email when it's done. You can use the in-browser planner to make plans more quickly, but they won't have the leftovers planned out from day to day.
I think the only suggestion I can think of is that the suggested meals should be as simple as possible. Part of the reason why I don't cook as often as I could is that I don't have the time (ok, I don't make it a high priority) to cook every meal. If I could simply slap together a sandwich in the morning for lunch and that would fill me up, then we'd be good, but a lot of these meals take more prep time than I'm willing to put forth.
Oh wow. Simply wow. I've wanted this without knowing I've wanted it.
This probably sounds sad but the effort and potential anxiety required in trying to pick the right foods and what I might want to eat often means I just get lazy and eat out instead. A case where having an astounding number of options often leaves one wanting to pick none of the above.
I'm the same way with the food picking anxiety, except I'm also really stingy at the same time so I'll often be too lazy to eat anything at all. That was the main inspiration for starting on a diet generator - to make it easier for me to gain weight.
Definitely going to work on a mobile version of the site soon!
But indeed, for the site to plan a person’s total caloric intake, it really should include popular liquids (it does plan shakes and smoothies).
Coffee and tea contain very little calories, but once you add milk and sugar (including syrups), it really adds up fast. Sodas and energy drinks are packed with calories.
If you like to drink, alcoholic beverages really should be accounted for. One gram of pure alcohol contains 7 kcalories. A 12 oz beer contains about 150 kcalories.[1]
It does mean that if you drink 5 pints during a night on the town, you ingest 1100 kcalories. For me, that would mean half of my recommended daily caloric intake.
I lived with a German guy while he was working on his PhD - this statement brought back many wonderful memories!! Thanks for that - I'm going to have to call him and see if he wants to go out for dinner!!! :)
I had it suggesting whole milk for a while, but a lot of people complained that it was giving them too much whole milk so I just removed it entirely. My algorithm doesn't give any special treatment to drinks, but maybe it should to output something more realistic looking.
I use the site myself, and the way I handle drinks is with the "locking" feature (via the lock icon next to a food or meal). If I know I'm going to be drinking a lot one night, I'll lock in a few beers from the "Add a dish" menu and regenerate the plan - the algorithm will fill in the rest of the plan to match the nutrition constraints, making it kindof like an autocomplete for your diet.
Ohh, thanks for the tip, I hadn’t noticed the ‘Add dish’ button. From there, you can search for milk in the ‘Basic foods’ section. Makes sense that I should manually add it, instead of having my drinks planned out.
But what happens if I end up drinking or eating more than was planned? Can I go back and edit the menu the day after? Also, does the site track calorie intake and progress over time?
I’ve used Livestrong’s MyPlate calorie tracker for quite some time, in which I would record my caloric intake every day. Of course, that’s after the fact, so it’s a different approach to minding calories than what your site does.
I actually have wanted this for a long time, and seriously considered making it myself. I'm much happier that someone else did this.
You have one user already.
I love that you have presets for Atkins/Keto, and that you allow me to remove certain types of items like beef and pork. That has been sorely missing from others I've seen like this.
If you integrate this with Instacart, I would love you forever.
I asked them about some kind of integration when I first launched, but because I had a pretty small userbase they dropped the conversation after a couple emails. Now that it's grown, maybe I'll prod them again.
Perhaps consider Postmates (http://postmates.com/). They deliver a broad range of goods in SF and Seattle.
Disclaimer - my friend works there.
First pass impression: Good balance between meal-generation and customization. For me, I would lock in breakfast and one lunch, likely varying a late lunch and/or dinner. Your comment below about locking in a couple beers (say every Thurs or Fri happy hour) is a great example of how to utilize this in a modern lifestyle.
I actually started building something like this several years ago, also looking to get into pricing info and historical data, but killed it when trying to figure out how to source the data.
Edit: Also awesome job :) I will be checking this out!
For the nutrition component at least, the USDA has a very messy, difficult to navigate, but still quite useful database of nutritional information for almost every possible ingredient. And there are several sources of structured recipe data available online. The tricky part is mapping recipe line items and preparation instructions onto the USDA data set, but once you figure that out you can get a pretty decent approximation of the caloric breakdown and nutrient contents of any given recipe.
1) It's so much better than not providing it at all.
2) People have been working to improve that stuff since forever, and are continuing to work on improving it. Especially now that Big Data is The Thing and a lot of groups are looking into making government data accessible.
I've been using this service since it was called swole.me -- incredible menu options and intuitive design. I'm able to track my macronutrients down to the gram and have plans based on workout or rest days. Anyone adhering to keto/paleo/leangains should check this out.
Me too! And I love how well done the site is, both usability wise and conceptually.
Next step: not sure how the health metrics would change, but you can have "order from <restaurant>" or "buy from <grocery store>" button, so lazy people like me know where to get the food from.
Next next step: directions for recipe? Most of the dishes looks awesome, but (maybe because I was not raised in US) I don't know how to prepare/cook them.
The transition from just entering info in to get a meal plan and an idea of how it works to a paid subscription was a little rough. It didn't carry over any info I already entered, and didn't make it clear I would have to enter a CC for the trial until after I had re-entered everything.
(Nothing wrong with making me enter a CC for the trial, but make it clearer upfront.)
Looks great, and seems to have improved a lot since the last time I saw it here. This has the potential to be a hugely helpful tool and is in a market that's really lacking.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 411 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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...
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.
Unless you also achieve a caloric deficit.
edit: opposite words day
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!
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.
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...
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?
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.
papa_bear: if you integrated this with a service like Instacart, I can only imagine how much money you could make.
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.
I'm going to send everyone I know to this site.
I'm impressed that (from a user's perspective) is barely flinching, although it's clear that it's under load right now.
Having tried more than a few of these I was prepared for disappointment.
I was delighted. Excellent tool! It really is that rare thing that you can't wait to tell people about.
here's what i'd like:
* You generate about 90% stuff alright, but that extra 10% is hard, I found myself hitting refresh many times. Can you give me a netflix style like it or not which will try to make better guesses?
* Can you hook it in with fit bit? They've already automated a lot of the information you're asking for. It might be nice to receive an email "Hey you didn't meet your daily goal, maybe this would be a better dinner than the one you planned"
* I'm not sure if i saw this or not, can you plan a week ahead so I can shop on weekends.
* I'd like an API, so I can add my own cool things. For instance on days where I have a lot of meetings I'm usually too exhausted to cook. So i'd like to plan easier meals.
You can plan a week ahead as a subscriber - the site will automatically send you 7 meal plans and a grocery list the day before your grocery shopping day, whatever you set that to be. And I may work on an API if I have time, but you can enter your own custom foods and recipes if you sign up. I don't make if obvious, but if you sign up and bail out after the email/password step, you can still use a basic free account to enter recipes and foods and things.
http://imgur.com/tVz5WCp
Not two things that usually go together!
I imagine if you got the right type of savory sausage, it'd be delicious.
[1]:http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/melon-wrapped-...
edit: Can you integrate into Google calendar at all?
http://i.imgur.com/cVpnXJB.png
I'm French, a country that has a certain reputation for eating healthy, and where a meal is typically:
- an "appetizer" (small salad or crudités)
- a main course (typically meat/fish + vegetable/starch)
- cheese & bread
- dessert (often fruit, or rarely something sweet like a slice of cake)
(breakfast is typically cereal with coffee/tea, maybe some fruit)
I'm not a nutritionist, but the recommended meals strike me as very unbalanced.
And the Nutrition guide's recommended protein level is insanely high.
My culture and upbringing have given me broad indications on what consists "eating healthily"; here I am seeing a tool made by a citizen of another culture, that claims it will produce healthy meal recommendations.
But the recommendations it gives me are wildly different from my cultural expectations.
All I'm trying to do is understand why there is this discrepancy.
That said, it does have some remediating factors - generally lots of fish and olive oil and (much) smaller portion sizes than the US. Also my cardiologist here in New Zealand said that they have a much lower incidence of heart disease than you would expect given the above, and no-one knows why. Maybe it's genetic, maybe olive oil is better for us than we currently understand.
Interesting stuff.
Because you didn't have enough confounding variables already. :P
http://www.eatthismuch.com/recipe/view/tofu-scramble,1565/
However, I wouldn't just eat Tofu Scramble for breakfast. I need complex carbs not to feel hungry soon after. I can do without carbs for dinner, but not for breakfast or lunch. A typical breakfast for me consists of 0% fat Greek yogurt, mixed with oats, linseed, nuts and fresh fruit. That still has plenty of fats, but also carbs.
But yeah, it would be good if the site would take the GI index of ingredients into account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index
1 gram of fat equals 9 kcalories, while 1 gram of protein or carbs equals 4 kcalories.
That means if your total caloric intake is 2000, you only need 74 grams of fat to reach 33%.
But maybe it's also linked to the fact that you're asking for 3400 calories? 2500 seems more reasonable for an adult male.
(Given your gender, age, height and weight:) Unless you work out for >4 hours every day, 3500 kcalories is way more than your body uses, so you’re sure to gain weight if you were to ingest that many calories every day. If you have a desk job or if you’re a student, choose ‘sedentary’ in the app. The result will be 2300 kcalories, which is most likely enough for you. On days in which you workout a lot, you can ingest a few hundred kcalories more.
I burn ~2800 kcal/day when I exercise.
This is an estimate based on tracking every meal, and tracking my weight every morning, rather than what I "should" be burning.
Unless you have a very active job, or exercise hard (think stumbling out of the gym) for substantially more than an hour a day, or spend every moment of your spare time being highly active, you're likely not burning 3400 calories.
But really, write down what you eat for a couple of weeks, count the calories, track your weight, then adjust the number of calories to target up/down depending on whether you want to increase/decrease your weight, as there are so many factors that can change what how much you need.
One hour of weight training for a 200 lb man is only 450 calories burned, or a Medium Fries at McDonalds. You have to really be running or other high cardio sports to burn even 1000 calories per hour.
Working out has also been shown to cause people to eat more subconsciously, so those 450 calories burned end up being only 100-200 net calories burned once you've had the protein shake after the hard workout.
http://i.imgur.com/5XRulJK.png
With the appetizer plate topmost, dessert in the middle, main course at the bottom of the picture.
It's also common for hungry/active people to have a second serving of the main course; a third helping would be rare.
Don't believe what you read on Reddit, HN, and other websites that hate Americans. Not all Americans eat McDonald's burgers and fries and other crappy processed food for every meal. We are just like anyone else. Some of us (not all) are healthy and eat very balanced and healthy meals, and some of us are in very good shape physically. On the other hand.... some other Americans (not all) are obese, unhealthy, eat bad food. It's a mixture. Not every American is the same. And there is not one "typical American meal" in my opinion.
As far as judging American nutrition, I've lived here for almost 4 years now, so I'm not basing my remarks solely off HN/Reddit/etc. :)
Of course not every single American eats the same. But, probably the best reflection of the "average" American diet is via "mainstream" restaurants (i.e. chains, but not fast food).
Look at places like Chili's, Friday's, Ruby Tuesday, and (gasp) Cheesecake Factory. Their portions are out of control and they are laden with fat and sodium. It is not unusual for a single meal at those places to nearly meet or exceed one's allowance of, calories, etc., for an entire day. And some meals (ex. Just about every entree at Cheesecake) are cartoonishly huge.
It's ridiculous. But, I think that defines the "average" American diet in the sense that these guys are all targeting the mass market. So, what they serve is the product of much research into what people want, and then is constantly being tweaked based on observation.
Oh, I see, you don't like to think about these things, because it goes against the "AMERICA IS HORRIBLE" narrative that is so popular on the internet.
I'm sorry, but the food here in the US is ABSURD. Aside from burgers and fries, there are few places that one can get an _affordable_ healthy meal. Two things jump out at me here: the portions and sodium.
In order to remain somewhat healthy, you have to cook or actively go out of your way and purchase food that turns out to cost more. "It's a mixture." does not accurately describe the US - I do believe it's off-balance here; more folks do consume such food.
I'm originally from Hong Kong, which gives me a slightly different perpective than most, but everything that I eat out in the east: tastes amazing, can be extremely affordable, doesn't make me feel bloated or 'full' when I'm done and is absolutely incredible.
I wouldn't say that France has a reputation for eating healthy (and no wonder, sheesh), more a reputation for "gourmet" food. Personally I found that the site gave a fairly sane meal plan for a sane calorie range. Whether the site generated it for you or not, surely you realized 3500 kcal is not a sustainable amount for a sedentary person to eat?
I actually built the first version of the site to make it easier for me to gain weight, and my strategy now is to lock a few cups of whole milk into each meal and then tell it to generate around it, giving me much less to cook.
As far as what I asked for, as I replied to another commenter[1], I let the website decide what my caloric intake should be, and I selected "stay at my current weight".
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640663
The hardest technical challenge I had was, knowing there would need to be a ton of recipes in the system to make it truly effective, I had to do an automated intake of recipes from many places. But ingredient normalization got in the way, even with really good regex/etl practices. For instance, a recipe says, "boneless skinless chicken breast".. another says, "skinless boneless chicken breast". Some list the # of breasts. Some list pounds. Some mean the breast is split, some don't. But in order for the nutrition info to be accurate, the normalization process had to be near perfect.
I ended up "buying" the source code to "recipefox" a recipe parsing plugin for firefox (for $100 or something like that) which helped tremendously, but still wasn't good enough for my tastes. I felt like to make it all work, i needed to essentially build a recipe ETL.
The monetization was kind of cool, I felt. Free for users. I felt that companies (food companies, supermarkets, etc) would put coupons for specific brands or specific stores on printed-out shopping lists based on the weekly recipes. i actually got alot of interest from that one from actual supermarkets. Thought that was cool.
Good luck with this. It was a tremendous idea 4 years ago and I always wondered when someone else was going to do it because it just seemed so damn obvious to me.
"I have a gluten free child and a wife on a diet. What should I buy at the grocery store this week and what the hell should I make?"
And I'd love to do the grocery store monetization idea, but trying to form partnerships with the grocery chains always seemed like a daunting time commitment. Maybe I'll send out some feelers this week.
I saw it on HN a couple weeks ago and it's basically one big project to scrape and index food blog recipes. It doesn't include preparation instructions but it uses schema.org's recipe format, which includes ingredients and other useful things: http://schema.org/Recipe
Otherwise, it's pretty rad. I like it a lot!
This probably sounds sad but the effort and potential anxiety required in trying to pick the right foods and what I might want to eat often means I just get lazy and eat out instead. A case where having an astounding number of options often leaves one wanting to pick none of the above.
This is a great idea.
Edit: Mobile website please!
Definitely going to work on a mobile version of the site soon!
But indeed, for the site to plan a person’s total caloric intake, it really should include popular liquids (it does plan shakes and smoothies).
Coffee and tea contain very little calories, but once you add milk and sugar (including syrups), it really adds up fast. Sodas and energy drinks are packed with calories.
If you like to drink, alcoholic beverages really should be accounted for. One gram of pure alcohol contains 7 kcalories. A 12 oz beer contains about 150 kcalories.[1]
[1] http://getdrunknotfat.com/
That's an exaggeration. Here are a few mainstream beers I looked up on that site-
Sam Adams Boston Lager: 175, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale: 175, PBR: 144, Guinness Draught: 128
It does mean that if you drink 5 pints during a night on the town, you ingest 1100 kcalories. For me, that would mean half of my recommended daily caloric intake.
I use the site myself, and the way I handle drinks is with the "locking" feature (via the lock icon next to a food or meal). If I know I'm going to be drinking a lot one night, I'll lock in a few beers from the "Add a dish" menu and regenerate the plan - the algorithm will fill in the rest of the plan to match the nutrition constraints, making it kindof like an autocomplete for your diet.
But what happens if I end up drinking or eating more than was planned? Can I go back and edit the menu the day after? Also, does the site track calorie intake and progress over time?
I’ve used Livestrong’s MyPlate calorie tracker for quite some time, in which I would record my caloric intake every day. Of course, that’s after the fact, so it’s a different approach to minding calories than what your site does.
I'm looking forward to trying this site and seeing if it works for me. Thanks!
Always have a jar of peanut butter handy, and boiled eggs on hand, too. This way, you'll never have an excuse not to eat.
You have one user already.
I love that you have presets for Atkins/Keto, and that you allow me to remove certain types of items like beef and pork. That has been sorely missing from others I've seen like this.
If you integrate this with Instacart, I would love you forever.
Disclaimer - my friend works there.
First pass impression: Good balance between meal-generation and customization. For me, I would lock in breakfast and one lunch, likely varying a late lunch and/or dinner. Your comment below about locking in a couple beers (say every Thurs or Fri happy hour) is a great example of how to utilize this in a modern lifestyle.
Keep up the good work.
Edit: Also awesome job :) I will be checking this out!
2) People have been working to improve that stuff since forever, and are continuing to work on improving it. Especially now that Big Data is The Thing and a lot of groups are looking into making government data accessible.
Next step: not sure how the health metrics would change, but you can have "order from <restaurant>" or "buy from <grocery store>" button, so lazy people like me know where to get the food from.
Next next step: directions for recipe? Most of the dishes looks awesome, but (maybe because I was not raised in US) I don't know how to prepare/cook them.
(Nothing wrong with making me enter a CC for the trial, but make it clearer upfront.)
Looks great, and seems to have improved a lot since the last time I saw it here. This has the potential to be a hugely helpful tool and is in a market that's really lacking.