14 ms·

Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers

• rcfox 13y ago
  I've tried to make a meal planner that used linear programming to ensure that I got all of the needed nutrients and minimized calories, but it didn't work out. It really liked to suggest moose meat and some insanely healthful fruit from Argentina. It also suggested I drink 642 cups of coffee a day, I guess because coffee has some trace amount of whatever nutrient everything else lacked. It was also difficult to figure out exactly how much of each nutrient I needed. There is no one list that has all of the nutrients, and different lists that cover different nutrients suggest different amounts of the nutrients that intersect the lists.
  • tvirot 13y ago
    How did you solve your LP? I think the issue might be due to an extreme point solution from simplex-type methods. Interior point methods might give you something different. Have you tried that?
    • rcfox 13y ago
      To be honest, I don't remember... I think I was using a Linux command-line LP solver.
  • jacques_chester 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure that meal planning is a packing problem, so it can't really be "solved". In fact it's worse than that; it's a multi-objective optimisation problem if you care about macro ratios and micronutrients.
    • rcfox 13y ago
      In LP, you can tell it that your variables must be greater than or less than certain values, so my intention was to keep each nutrient between the recommended minimums and maximums.
  • nazgulnarsil 13y ago
    Soylent Orange. :) Although I haven't min maxed the ratios yet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZYM012N0JZTzEtVk05MVF4dlZyZ2c&usp=drive_web https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...
• theboss 13y ago
  I will give you all of my money if you include support for dietary restrictions. I have food allergies and can't consume milk.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    You can uncheck milk from the Meal options menu - just click the "Meal options" button on the right side, and a bit down the page there's a big checklist of foods you can filter out of the meal plans.
    • theboss 13y ago
      Well I guess I owe you a lot of money.....
• orangethirty 13y ago
  I want to pay you $10 a month to be able to use this. Please include a recipe/ingredients list for me to be able to go grocery shopping. Plus give me a weekly list of my meals so I dont have to think about what to cook or eat.
  • ericd 13y ago
    That's exactly what it does, except for $9/mo :-D
    • orangethirty 13y ago
      Increase the price.
      • nazgulnarsil 13y ago
        increase the price The creator is drastically underestimating how much removing this pain point is worth to people.
        • ericd 13y ago
          How much do you think he should charge? In a world of $8/mo Netflix, people make some pretty harsh value comparisons on services.
          • orangethirty 13y ago
            I already said 10 for the MVP. But I will pay more for a more robust product. I know a thousand people would. That's a hundred grand without any VC drama. Under the radar.
            • ericd 13y ago
              I know, I was asking the person I replied to, if he thinks ETM is dramatically undercharging. 9->10 is a pretty small difference with a potentially outsized effect on conversion.
• 27182818284 13y ago
  I am surprised and delighted by this site! I cannot stress enough how well this nailed the contingencies that may come up when I was just using this. My first thought, I actually don't know how many calories I should eat--BAM there is a button that helps me generate it. What if I want to lose weight? BAM! Button for that option. Then I see the meals generated and I think, well, I'm a vegetarian so this chicken won't work, but then BAM I see the vegetarian button. You've got a real knack for thinking like your users.
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    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.
    • eriktrans 13y ago
      How long has the service been around for, and how did you get traction? You have quite a lot of Twitter and Facebook followers/fans.
      • papa_bear 13y ago
        It started out as Swole.me (http://www.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.
        • onedev 13y ago
          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.
• kintamanimatt 13y ago
  What's your stack?
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    A lot of js/jquery in the front, django in the back.
    • kintamanimatt 13y ago
      Nice that it's holding up so well!
      • papa_bear 13y ago
        It hasn't fallen yet, but I had no idea hackernews would hit my servers this hard. Fingers crossed.
        • kintamanimatt 13y ago
          What DB servers(s) are you using? Any caching? What kind of server is it running on? I'm impressed that (from a user's perspective) is barely flinching, although it's clear that it's under load right now.
• mauricesvay 13y ago
  Looks very comprehensive, with recipes, meal price, and food options. You even thought about vegans. Great job!
• RavneetGrewal 13y ago
  Impressed. As others have said, there is a option for everything that came to my mind (vegetarian here). Good work. Will use this.
• stmchn 13y ago
  This is great! I've seen a couple similar sites but not anything nearly as well executed as this. Good job!
• richkuo 13y ago
  zyzz brah
• RakshaC 13y ago
  Really impressive. Hope to get the Mobile app soon. Any plans for other recipe sites integration?
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    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.
• clavalle 13y ago
  I saw this on reddit /r/fitness about a month ago. 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.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• w1ntermute 13y ago
  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).
• swalsh 13y ago
  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.
  • eriktrans 13y ago
    Seconded. An API would really be appreciated. I have some really cool ideas for things I can probably do with this service as well.
  • pplante 13y ago
    For me the ability to shop on the weekends would make using this easier.
    • papa_bear 13y ago
      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.
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    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.
• coob 13y ago
  Very impressed. However, I had to laugh at this meal suggestion: http://imgur.com/tVz5WCp http://imgur.com/tVz5WCp Not two things that usually go together!
  • mikegreco 13y ago
    Melon and sausage is something I've never heard of, but melon and prosciutto is actually a very common Italian dish (that's also quite tasty!) [1] 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-in-prosciutto-recipe/index.html http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/melon-wrapped-...
• RyanIyengar 13y ago
  Great site! I can see it being super useful. edit: Can you integrate into Google calendar at all?
• moeamaya 13y ago
  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.
• lemming 13y ago
  One thing that would be really useful would be a "family mode". My wife and I are currently working out together. I want to gain weight, she wants to lose or maintain weight while losing fat and gaining muscle. We always eat together and it's unrealistic for us to cook two different meals every time. Ideally it could propose a meal for two at least for the main 3 meals and tell us the proportion of the meal that she should be eating (since the composition will probably be similar, just the quantity will differ).
  • w1ntermute 13y ago
    You can increase the number of people in the meal settings: http://i.imgur.com/9JOlhCV.png http://i.imgur.com/9JOlhCV.png
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    I added the family meal planning feature a few days ago, but it's more simple than what you're asking - it basically just scales up that meal X times in your grocery list, so the rest of your family is forced to eat whatever random meals my site spits out :-) Something like an account link would be awesome, but would some serious complexity to my algorithm. Definitely something to shoot for though.
    • Serow225 13y ago
      That 'family mode' is a good start, but to be really useful it would be awesome to be able to specify different constraints/preferences/etc per family member, and yet have the resulting recipes work (or be modifiable) for the entire family. For example, the recipe book The Adaptable Feast is great for families that have a mix of vegetarians/vegans/omnivores. It would be great if your site could handle this type of situation too. Overall, awesome job! :)
• shivaas 13y ago
  really good stuff! gonna give it a shot next week for my meal planning
• GuiA 13y ago
  There's probably a culture clash here but... is this considered a balanced nutritious meal in the US? http://i.imgur.com/cVpnXJB.png 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.
  • gertef 13y ago
    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.
    • GuiA 13y ago
      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.
      • smspence 13y ago
        Then just add some extra vegetables and fruit, if that's what you want...
        • GuiA 13y ago
          I think you're misinterpreting my comment. 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.
• jongold 13y ago
  Been using this site since it was Swole.me - brilliant, thanks so much :)
• bernz 13y ago
  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?"
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    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.
    • 13y ago
• papa_bear 13y ago
  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.
  • alexchamberlain 13y ago
    Don't be embarrassed; HN has taken down far simpler, yet more famous sites than yours. I am very impressed it is still standing at all.
    • wmeredith 13y ago
      Yeah. I just bookmarked it for later, because this has me really excited! Good luck!
  • pullo 13y ago
    simple and effective! good luck.
• tchen 13y ago
  this is a cool improvement from swole. great work
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• Jemaclus 13y ago
  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. Otherwise, it's pretty rad. I like it a lot!
  • bstpierre 13y ago
    If you go into the meal options, click Meal Options in the header, and click "Can't Cook" then it gives meals that are (IMO) really low on prep time.
    • Jemaclus 13y ago
      Ah, cool! Didn't even see that.
    • alvarop 13y ago
      A prep time estimate to go with the meals would be a nice feature
• jvanderwal 13y ago
  I was just looking for this kind of information the other day. Is there a way to give it a budget?
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    At the very bottom of the meal options page you can set a daily price limit.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• blocke 13y ago
  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. This is a great idea. Edit: Mobile website please!
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    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!
    • w1ntermute 13y ago
      The site doesn't seem to include drinks. Do you plan on adding them?
      • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
        The name of the site is Eat this much ;) 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/ http://getdrunknotfat.com/
        • sciurus 13y ago
          "A 12 oz beer contains about 300 kcalories." 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
• matthiaswh 13y ago
  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.
• mhahn 13y ago
  this would be awesome if it had an integration with instacart, ie. you send me the groceries every week
• rrinorl 13y ago
  Are you looking for any more developers?
• nemo1618 13y ago
  Really cool! Needs a Rob Rhinehart mode though... Breakfast: Soylent, 20 oz. Lunch: Soylent, 20 oz. Dinner: Soylent, 20 oz.
  • brunorsini 13y ago
    you totally stole my joke :)
• instakill 13y ago
  There is no mince on the menu :(
• jordan_clark 13y ago
  This is actually really, really useful. Even pulls in the recipes.. Excellent work. claps
• mahyarm 13y ago
  Now the next step is to offer prep & delivery for these meal plans in large busy worker markets, like SF, Chicago, Boston, Palo Alto, NYC, etc. Obvious way to monetize. I'd pay $800/month for this.
  • jacques_chester 13y ago
    In Australia there's already a service doing premade meal plans with delivery to a common dropoff point: http://musclemealsdirect.com.au/ http://musclemealsdirect.com.au/
• josephjrobison 13y ago
  This is exactly what I've always wanted. I used to use nutrition data to count meals but that got tiring and wasn't that amazing. I love how you can calculate the daily cost, which is a huge thing for me. The fact that I can calculate a vegan meal with 3500 calories, and enough protein for under $5 a day is just jaw dropping.
• cjoh 13y ago
  This site could make a whole bunch of money if it just put together a shopping cart on Amazon for me and took the referral money.
  • contingencies 13y ago
    Good tip. Australia: Woolworths.com.au Mainland Europe/Asia: Carrefour group. UK/Asia: Tesco group. One potentially interesting Asian market to consider is Singapore (almost certain supermarket delivery services must exist there due to regionally high income levels and tiny geography, plus it's full of office-dwelling cosmetic-concern types).
    • jameswyse 13y ago
      If this hooked up to Woolworths I'd pay way more than $9/mo!
    • gterrill 13y ago
      I don't see woolworths.com.au having the wherewithall to embrace something like this. Might be worth chatting with someone more "hungry" (sorry, couldn't resist) - e.g. http://www.hellofresh.com.au/ http://www.hellofresh.com.au/
  • moosterv 13y ago
    Agreed. Grocery Gateway here in Canada. Every week my food would appear at my door!
  • gianbasagre 13y ago
    NZ: countdown.co.nz
  • pnathan 13y ago
    As a note to people, http://www.amazongrocer.com/ http://www.amazongrocer.com/ and http://fresh.amazon.com/ http://fresh.amazon.com/ exist.
    • xymostech 13y ago
• mark_l_watson 13y ago
  Nice! I especially like your UI and nutrients display. I have been working on something (cookingspace.com) that tries to solve a different problem: how to use the ingredients you already have in your kitchen. My email is in my profile. I would enjoy talking with you.
• physcab 13y ago
  This is pretty marvelous. I have always wanted to create something like this, but the details have always seemed daunting to me. I couldn't think of a way of merging recipes I liked with nutritional facts and then assembling building blocks for meal plans automatically without a ton of manual labor in data entry. Are these recipes crowdsourced? Have you just been taking copious nutritional notes for a while? If you figured out a way to integrate something like Epicurious or AllRecipes complete with pictures and reviews, it would make using this site so much more fun. Right now it feels mechanical which is great for people who see food as just fuel intake. But for me food is more than just fuel, its an experience meant to be enjoyed and savored.
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    You're right that there's a lot of work before having even something basically functional - the first version of the site only had about 50 foods to pick from that I entered by hand, all very basic (e.g. ground beef, avocado), and it would throw them at you in a random combination. Then I found the USDA food database, but their formatting is a mess and I spent a couple weeks cleaning it up by hand. The recipes are almost all crowdsourced, and it's probably one of the site's weakest points right now since there aren't a ton of them. I'd definitely like to integrate with a larger recipe site, but the biggest issue is matching their ingredients to the USDA foods to accurately guess the nutrition - tying it to individual foods rather than just importing the recipe's nutrition makes it easy for users to modify the recipes if they want. I'm working on some stuff to make it happen though, so hopefully soon!
    • zecho 13y ago
      As a fitness nut and a bit of a foodie, I love this site, but I'm glad you recognize that the recipe database leaves much to be desired. With almost every nutrition app or website I've seen, there's such a ridiculous emphasis on prepackaged foods or sources like restaurants. I'd be super pleased if you could pull of nutrition calculations based off of individual foods within a recipe. All in all, though, this is fantastic. I'm going to definitely give a try.
    • danhauk 13y ago
• crackbaby 13y ago
  spartansupper.com runs a twitter feed that generates nutritionally (20+ nutrients) complete diets with calorie/carb/protein constraints
• prawn 13y ago
  For the front page demo, I like the method for suggesting the calorie count to input, but I would put a few examples front and centre so it's even easier for people to check it out. e.g., "For Robert who is 205cm and 104kg and reasonably active, try 3,200 calories for a sample menu to see how the process works."
• Felix21 13y ago
  Ive been using this app for almost a year now. I know nothing better for planning your diet, its a great tool for a bodybuilder. Good Job Papa_bear
• SoftwareMaven 13y ago
  I eat low carb, so I tried customizing for such a diet. Here are my thoughts: First, huge kudos for allowing me to customize macronutrients that way. Second, it would be nice to have a "How do you eat?" as the first step. You could have options like "Low calorie", "Low carb", "Paleo", etc. That could pre-set macro-nutrients and food-type checkboxes. The next step could be customization of important features (calories for low-cal, carbs for low-carb, ?? for paleo). Finally, for my low carb diet, I unchecked the expected: grains, beans, some fruit, some dairy. Then hit generate. I kept getting bacon and pecans. A lot. Anyway, this is awesome, and I look forward to seeing what it evolves into.
  • count 13y ago
    Uh, it has that already. Go back in and fill out the nutrition profile thing, and it'll let you pick 'Paleo' or 'Low Carb/Keto', etc.
    • papa_bear 13y ago
      It does, but he's right about the abundance of pecans and bacon. Adding more low carb options is one of my top priorities.
    • SoftwareMaven 13y ago
      The problem with headers that never leave is that you can't easily tell when you wind up scrolled 20% down a page. If you click on "Customize", you are scrolled below. If you click on "Meal Options" (or notice you are scrolled) you get to see it. My point remains, putting that up front would be more useful. I came really close to ignoring it when I saw calories was the only thing that showed up front and center. I decided to dig deeper since it was a "Show HN".
• alepper 13y ago
  This is great, and really impressive. There's a couple minor things I'm looking for, in addition to all the things I looked for and found: - A 'regenerate all meals' button. Having generated, but then tweaked the meal options for every day, it seems I have to load & regenerate each day in turn? - Ability to customize frequency of automatic emails. I see that I can manually email a calendar range's plan, but I do most of my grocery shopping online, which incurs a delivery charge (and needs me to hang around for that delivery). I'd prefer to book up a couple weeks in advance, even if it means figuring out what I'll do about perishables.
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    In your account page there's a "Reset meal plans" button, but it's more like letting you run through the signup process again - it will nuke any edits you've made to your templates to match what you put in the signup form. And I didn't think anyone would want to plan more than a week in advance, but I'll definitely consider it.
• ylem 13y ago
  This is awesome! You might also add an option to buy some of the ingredients online :-p (for example, services like Peapod if the person is in that region)
• ylem 13y ago
  One other thought--you might also want to search a person's geographic area and see if you can find the best deals on the ingredients for recipes :-p But, generally--wow!!!
  • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    +1, I try to only eat locally grown produce, which of course means that the offerings are dependent on the seasons. I’d love for the app to take into account my country of residence, what season it is there right now, and then use that information to determine what’s being grown there now.
• pratikjhaveri 13y ago
  if it's any help, would love to host the site on hpcloud.com (hp's public cloud). drop me a line if you're interested pratik.jhaveri(at)hp.com. Not saying this is an issue with your hosting provider - but perhaps it could help. * I work in the hpcloud team. this post does not reflect HP's needs/opinions.
  • ericd 13y ago
    I think part of the problem is getting many times normal traffic and not being provisioned for that :-)
• deskglass 13y ago
  When I set my meal options to only show vegan meals, my recommended protein intake went from at least 101 g to at least 61 g. If anything, being vegan requires me to eat slightly more protein (assuming plant proteins are harder to digest than animal proteins). While it's harder to get protein as a vegan, I don't think that means the protein goal should be lowered. Also, I agree with others that you predict user behavior very well.
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    You're totally right - I do lower the protein target mostly to compensate for the fact that I don't have many high protein vegan recipes. Once the database is bigger I'll try to remember to change it back.
• greghinch 13y ago
  This is pretty neat and well executed. But does the algorithm work on meal combinations that make sense? Two of my generated meals, one was chocolate mousse with a side of bacon & tomatoes, and the next meal was beef stew with a side of fruit salad. Those things may make sense to eat together by raw data, but in all practical sense they sound like pretty terrible meals...
  • zecho 13y ago
    I noticed that as well. You can refresh the meal until it makes some sense, though.
• dacilselig 13y ago
  You already received much praise on the service itself, however I wanted to congratulate you having such a clear and short TOS. TOS;DR would be proud of you.
• nilkn 13y ago
  Absolutely brilliant idea. Also want to praise you for adding in the tool for suggesting calorie consumption--like many others here, I had no idea what to put. Even if the calculated number isn't ideal, that's great user-friendly design.
• Heliosmaster 13y ago
  I thought about this a while ago, some sort of smart pantry! :D
• mietek 13y ago
  This is fantastic. Thank you for explicitly listing keto, and for allowing to customize the exact amount of macronutrients. That being said: The custom macronutrient range sliders are a bit unintuitive. I think both range sliders and percentages should be displayed at the same time, and both should be kept in sync. How can I see exactly which ingredients will go into my meals? I've disabled all fruit, but I still got a meal with melons in it. Also, I'd like to replace non-fat yoghurt with full-fat yoghurt in my meals. How can I do this?
• edouard1234567 13y ago
  Love the idea of having a personal "Chef" who cares about my health! One feature idea : you could integrate with one these smart wifi scale and use my daily weight as input. This way you'll have a daily feedback loop.
  • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    Exactly. I use a Withings[1] WiFi scale, which integrates with the Weightbot[2] app. I'd love to see its data integrated with a calorie planner. Currently, I use MyFitnessPal for tracking, but I’d ditch it in a heartbeat if this site were to integrate Withings data. (Even better would be if I could import Livestrong or MyFitnesspal historic data) FWIW: Withings has an API[3]. [1] http://withings.com/en/scales http://withings.com/en/scales [2] http://tapbots.com/software/weightbot/ http://tapbots.com/software/weightbot/ [3] http://www.withings.com/api http://www.withings.com/api
• dpcan 13y ago
  LOL LOL LOL!!!! The list it gave me consisted of everything I'm alergic to AND my 2 least favorite foods on the planet: pickles and celery!! However, this is pretty awesome, my first try was super funny, but I'll definitely check it out more. I would think that it should also have some checkboxes for common allergies, a la nuts, and maybe even foods I really don't like to exclude... I'd love to see what it shows then. EDIT: I did see the food options section, but it seems to go from SUPER EASY all the way to ridiculously complicated with the click of that 1 button. There's some fine tuning to be done on this site, but my guess is that he'll kick some ass with this system - especially once it's an APP.
  • cosmie 13y ago
    It does. Click on the "Meal Options" button to the right, scroll down to "Food and Recipe filters", deselect anything you don't want/like.
• Shivetya 13y ago
  Impressive, however their recommendations based on age, weight, and such, when your trying to lose weight would do the opposite for me. I would definitely pay for an mobile version, especially one that could keep recipes locally that I could pop up at a moments notice, as in while in the store.
• dreamdu5t 13y ago
  Please turn this into a company or start charging ASAP. Do not give this awesome tool away for free. Do not sell yourself short. You have created something truly excellent.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    Thanks! You can make a single day's meal plan for free to get a taste of the generator, but I actually do charge if you want it to send you a plan every week automatically.
• dgudkov 13y ago
  I'd prefer to see some proven recipes even if they slightly differ in calories and fats from settings. Having salmon, melon and celery in one meal (it generated this recipe) doesn't work, even if it's exactly the requested amount of calories, fats, etc. Otherwise - excellent idea.
• andrewmb 13y ago
  As a suggestion for a next step or advanced functionality, if there was a way to put in my own recipes or ingredients?
  • Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    OP answered this elsewhere in the thread: if you sign up, you can add ingredients and recipes. You don’t even have to be a paying member; if you skip the payment step, you can still log in.
• jaynos 13y ago
  Looks promising, but the recommended lunch was chicken salad, 2 cups of yogurt, and celery. No carbs...plus that is a lot of yogurt.
  • vidarh 13y ago
    Perfectly reasonable depending what your goals are... A typical lunch for me is 600g of chicken drumsticks, 400g of lean chicken breast in sweet chili sauce - alternatively some prawn, a sausage and egg sandwich, and a bottle of yoghurt drink, and a small flapjack... I'm sick of chicken, but I'm doing leangains style intermittent fasting and getting a large proportion of my protein (220g+/day) in during my first meal of the day makes it a lot easier to meet the goals for the rest of the day.
• serf 13y ago
  Way cool. Only time I've said that on HN. I'm a picky eater, and have been told dozens of times to make a grocery list. Thanks.
• fatjokes 13y ago
  Brilliant! Add a couples option for registration! Like, a small discount over $9/person x 2 ppl.
• noonespecial 13y ago
  The idea didn't really seem that exciting to me, but the execution of this is very impressive indeed. I'm going to be using this to demonstrate what I mean by an effective user interface. The abstraction of complexity until the very moment its needed is masterful here. Its simple right up until you need it to be complicated. Hat is off.
  • papa_bear 13y ago
    Hah, thanks! I'm flattered. You're right that the idea isn't for everyone - it takes a special level of laziness to want to be told what to make for every meal.
    • bluepen44 13y ago
      replying here since I can't figure out how to PM.. On the food scale under How-To Guide you spelled 'suspicion' incorrectly. BTW, love the idea! Plan on digging into it when I get home this evening! Just wanted to give you a heads up on that spelling :)
• saiko-chriskun 13y ago
  man I was about to start building this exact thing hahah. nice work!
• brntn 13y ago
  Strange feature request: I'd love to be able to specify dietary requirements on a per-meal basic. My partner is vegan, so I'll normally cook vegan dinners, but like to get meat into lunch/the occasional breakfast.
• tacticus 13y ago
  This is awesome i am really impressed. Signed up right now
• bm1362 13y ago
  Awesome- I was considering doing something like this as well. After following the Soylent posts (http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424), I'm interested to know if I'm nutrient deficient. Since EatThisMuch already shows the micronutrients per meal, is there a way you could show daily deficiencies as well?
• helloburin 13y ago
  I love the idea! Most weeks I buy way too much food I can consume and just think that I bought too much vs ate too little. If I was able to be confident that I need to eat ALL of it, I might not under-eat like I have been (trying to gain muscle). I'll play with it more and let you know what I think as I use it.
• patrickod 13y ago
  I've been mulling over this idea for quite a while after moving into a place on my own and wanting to eat healthier. Really excited to start using it. Impressive execution. Best of luck with this! I'm definitely rooting for its success
• akoumjian 13y ago
  I am really impressed with the meal suggestions it is giving me, using the keto option.
• gburt 13y ago
  iPad app please. I want to embed an iPad in kitchen somewhere that will just tell me what to eat every day. Edit: Even better if you can told me when I have the opportunity to do mass prep on appropriate things.
• marianov 13y ago
  Is there a way to choose non-USA type of meals? I mean, in South America, Spain and other parts of the world breakfast means coffee and cereal, or toast with jam, cookies, fruits or croissants. And it's a light meal. Lunch is a strong one course meal, "tea" is a meal (usually with no tea involved), and dinner is the usual.
  • ajanuary 13y ago
    I really wouldn't bother starting down the road of trying to classify meal other than breakfast by name.
• RK 13y ago
  Some of the recipes call for 0.13 cups or 0.06 cups, etc. I assume you can convert that to other units like tablespoons / teaspoons for the non-metric inclined?
• short_circut 13y ago
  It would be nice if there were a few more things I could filter out. Like pork and bacon I feel like should be separate categories, I have no interest in using Whey protein powder, and I hate cilantro, but none of these are options to add or remove. Would it be possible to include these in the list?
  • short_circut 13y ago
    Sorry I just found the whey powder option, but it just replaced it with a different protein powder. Can I remove protein powder all together?
• twanlass 13y ago
  Seriously awesome. I have to say though, you're not charging enough! Find a reason to add another tier!
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• Kluny 13y ago
  This is awesome. It needs a "vegetarian" or "broke" feature.
  • frakkingcylons 13y ago
    It does actually, click on the meal options and set your eating preferences to Vegetarian and then you can limit your daily meal budget to something like $5/day or $10/day. I freaking love this thing.
• k3n 13y ago
  Phenomenal execution! At first, I was thinking "oh not another of these sites", but then I found the various options and features and was floored. I wasn't even in the market for a meal planner, but this may have convinced me otherwise. My only criticisms are that the hover-overs (such as for the thumbs-up and the lock) take too long and aren't descriptive enough. I think the timer is set to 2s or so? I had already given up on them originally, and then went back to try it again and barely noticed as I moved off it that it had one. Also, there's nothing in the walkthrough that mentions the "like" button....is it supposed to show up on my FB? or it'll just be weighted heavier in the future? A possible feature (I don't think it has this) would be able to export in calendar(s) format, i.e. I could generate a week's menu and then import it into a calendar app. Just an idea. Again, well done on the site, and good luck!
• kenjackson 13y ago
  Well done. Maybe the first Show HN app I've ever sent to family and friends.
• xarien 13y ago
  Well done, but my initial trials kept suggesting a diet that was too high in carbs and too low in protein.
• realrocker 13y ago
  Awesome! I am from India, so pretty much useless for me. Need food locale's. Like Yesterday!!! Be quick about it. And India first, please.
• philip1209 13y ago
  How is this made? A binary integer programming model?
• andyfang 13y ago
  asdf
• cwilson 13y ago
  All this needs is a button on the generated grocery list to have them delivered to your door. Partner with TaskRabbit, InstaCart, Safeway (I believe they do free deliveries for anything over $40), etc. This is absolutely amazing (like many others are saying, I've been wanting something like this for years), but if delivery were added, I'd never have to worry about the hassle that is shopping and meal planning again! First world problems I know, but this is actually a pain point for me because of work hours. Also, I'm SO happy you decided to charge for this from day 1. I'm most definitely subscribing and I now won't worry this amazing service will go away!
  • dclowd9901 13y ago
    Charge $10/mo for it and shoo the investors away as your money comes pouring in.
• dr_ 13y ago
  Interesting. I guess the only question that comes to mind is how accurate is the calorie data, which is really what seems to drive this. Accurate calorie data is really hard to come by, unless it's specifically assessed in a lab setting. Ideally you can run a test group that uses the service for a month and weighs in weekly. Would add serious validation. Still, great idea and effort so far.
• shloime 13y ago
  Genius.
• tallon 13y ago
  This is amazing.
• chmullig 13y ago
  Connect it to Fresh Direct (and understand the quantities things are actually sold in?) and I'd be in love...
• utunga 13y ago
  Good call. Definitely a 'thing i need', and (having just shelled out my ccard) clearly something willing to pay for. Not sure where to put this feedback so I'll put it here. Both very minor issues but for what its worth... - When I switched to metric and put my height in meters/cm the calorie calc went nuts and estimated 7300 kcals. Very confusing to me. Ah I've figured out the cause. I had put 1 meter and 828 cm (shouldve been 82cm). Perhaps cap cm at 100 or put a boundary condition on overall height? - In New Zealand the 'days' thing doesn't work right (ie its end of the day Thursday here, but its giving me meal plans as if Thursday were tomorrow). Some timezone adjustments/detection would make it all that much more easier to understand.
• sravfeyn 13y ago
  It would really help if anybody can link a good guide on basics of nutrition, calories, metabolism and their effects on body, weight. I never cared about these things and I never understood all the calorie calculations on the diet plans or why they should be the way they are. I searched on internet, but these topics are so full of litter. I would appreciate if anyone can link a to genuine nutrition basics. Edit: It's better if the guide is more general, than american-centric.
  • otibom 13y ago
    Oh yes, this please. Something straightforward, simple and scientific. Possibly exhaustive. I would pay for a quality book like that. There is so much noise on this topic. Oh and not too American biased would be great as well.
• niico 13y ago
  "Make what people want" at its best.
• merusame 13y ago
  Awesome tool, could turn out very successful.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• k__ 13y ago
  Why is it per x meals? If I still have to think about how much meals I have to make every day, the "auto-pilot" isn't worth THAT much :\ First priority should be on calories a day. After that some fine tuning with the meal count would be nice.
• cx42net 13y ago
  Great work! I can't imagine the hours you spent building it ! :)
• awjr 13y ago
  I'm going to put a request in because this stuff does my head in slightly, can we have measurements in grams? Not sure how that would work for a 'cup of kale'. I can see myself buying a bunch of American measurements just to use this site. Very very cool.
• MrGrillet 13y ago
  Great job. Really simple to use.
• kidsil 13y ago
  +1 for adding custom filtering options (Vegan, Paleo, etc.)
• Guthur 13y ago
  Really awesome tool. Couple of suggestions: Not sure if it is possible in the current form, but it would be nice if I could specify some ingredients to be used in a given plan. The scenario is that I have picked up some cheap carrots for example and I want to use them soon. Also would be awesome if there was a seasonal preference setting so that it try to select ingredients that are currently in season such as winter veg etc.
• Shivetya 13y ago
  Could use a bit more separation of ingredients, cream and sour cream should not share the same selection. Creams would great in many sauces and have a completely different effect than sour creams. Fish selections might want to expand the number of white fishes listed. Interestingly enough some recipes given have vegetables not listed as selectable, cucumbers and water melon are two I noticed; they were in same recipe! Perhaps an advanced list of ingredients could be offered that allows for more picky eaters. Still amazing number of recipes.
  • Shivetya 13y ago
    there are some bugs that are annoying, if you let the system choose a customize diet based on your profile it ignores your exclusions. Example, I provided weight, age, height, sex, and desire to lose weight. Now recipes offered have items I have not checked. Does this hold true if your registered? It becomes quite useless if one segment of the site overrides another.
• fijal 13y ago
  This is exactly one of the things where the cultural divide is just too far for me to understand. Do people really plan meals like this in america?
• nicolethenerd 13y ago
  This is awesome! Two features I would love to see are: 1) A calendar, so you could plan out meals for more than one day 2) A way to enter your own meals, so that the generated meals could be planned around the ones you entered (ie. if I had X for breakfast and lunch, what should I make for dinner?)
• nathanb 13y ago
  Very, very cool. Amazingly polished, and takes a lot of different dietary needs into account. Thanks for making and sharing!
• mistermann 13y ago
  This is one of the greatest implementations of a good idea I've ever seen, like really, really good. By the sounds of it you have plenty of traffic as is, but I'd think /r/loseit and likely several other subreddits would be all over this. (I see you've been mentioned in 2 comments on /r/loseit)
• _halcyon_ 13y ago
  This a total 1st world problem, but I stress over what to make for dinner way too much. This seems like it would help a lot. At least I cook.
• JungleGymSam 13y ago
  This is very very cool. You've made a really well thought out service with this. Congrats.
• fluts 13y ago
  Assuming it does work, this is really cool, but... $9 per month? Not sure people are going to pay for this, it's possible though.
• 13hours 13y ago
  Great idea, fantastically executed. One suggestion or request: I would love to specify from what recipe group or combination of groups each meal should be made up of. For example: Breakfast : Pick something from the cereals group, and a smoothie if it fits Lunch : Sandwich group and salad group Dinner : Mostly meat group, salad group, desert group.
• fluts 13y ago
  OK, I tried this a bit, and while it looks good, it actually sucks. For example, a pasta dish is generally supposed to have around 500 kcal, while this site lists less than 200 for "canned" pasta with tomato sauce (protip: no one eats canned pasta, except perhaps in the U.S.), and in general the site has no real clue about pasta. The first fatal problem is that dishes must be divided both by type of preparation/acquisition (fast food, restaurant meal, basic cooking, microwaved food, no preparation, etc.) and by culture, since there dramatic differences in both. Then it needs to know about how breakfast works in several cultures (in some you only eat "sweet" food, in others you have stuff like sausage and bacon), the concept of appetizer+pasta+meat/fish with side dish+dessert, how the various broad type of dishes (e.g. pasta, pizzas, steak, cakes,, etc.) work and so on. Finally, it needs focus more on fundamental recipes, since no one is going to prepare anything complicated at home, and restaurants may not offer them or prepare such foods unpredictably, making the nutrient planning ineffective. As it is, it's unusable unless you want to completely change your eating habits and eat in a highly weird fashion, or perhaps manually enter reasonable food choices.
• snake_plissken 13y ago
  this. is. amazing.
• triplepoint217 13y ago
  Have you considered parsing the Diabetes guidelines so that you could add an entry for people needing to follow that diet.
• Catchpowle 13y ago
  I think this is the best implementation of this kind of site I've used. I see you already include a paleo option and thats great, but as an ibs sufferer I also adhere to the fodmap diet's guidelines and have had a lot of success with it. This diet excludes foods such as garlic which you cannot currently exclude manually unless you block each individual recipe which I have done. It would be great if you gave a fodmap option or even just the ability to exclude these items. Here's further information on the subject: http://blog.katescarlata.com/fodmaps-basics/ http://blog.katescarlata.com/fodmaps-basics/ Another interesting take on the paleo side of things is the "perfect health diet" which the creators believe is optimised to help prevent disease, premature aging and the like, but is not strictly paleo. I've found the information covered in their book very interesting and I recommend their site for more information: http://perfecthealthdiet.com/the-diet/ http://perfecthealthdiet.com/the-diet/ Again, great job, best of luck!
• nawitus 13y ago
  Thanks a lot for including vegan meals! Btw, when I generated a vegan meal it included sausages in one of the recipes. Could be vegan sausages, but that should be more clear.
• patpatpat 13y ago
  You have a user, I love this.
• ahoyhere 13y ago
  If you don't love automagic, you should check out http://plantoeat.com http://plantoeat.com. Its bookmarklet imports from all the major recipe sites and most food blogs, and you can then create your plan, your shopping list, etc., with ease. Just schedule a meal on the planner and it gets added to your shopping list. There are some issues with duplicate formatting but otherwise it's great. To Eat This Much: Cream cheese pickles? A mixture of cream cheese, pickles, and cured beef??? Fabulous fried cabbage? I… uh… grosssss. I would never eat either of those.
• wsujosh 13y ago
  This is awesome.
• lynxnathan 13y ago
  Hey man, this is amazing! You just gained a subscriber! :) It would be really good if you had a way to choose certain recipes to available only to certain meals of the day. This way you could find recipes on the public repository or create one yourself and add to the "list of possible combinations". I also think that the "like" on each Meal of the day should make the combination of recipes in that meal to be "bundled" and be selectable/randomizable from the ones you already liked , so you can basically open the website everyday and choose the meals you wanna have today. A "Daily Shopping List" button, or a "Shop for the next X days" would not be bad at all either!
• intended 13y ago
  The reddit link to fitness/faq seems to be broken.