
Show HN: Joy – a minimalist diet tracker for ketoers, fasters, bulkers, and more - silviogutierrez
https://www.joyapp.com
======
silviogutierrez
Founder and developer here: as an intermittent faster, weight lifter, and
amateur cook, I always found the leading diet trackers very limited. They made
everything about my tracking difficult: from logging foods, to counting net
carbs, to varying my caloric targets per day.

So I built Joy. The key feature is its flexibility. Joy allows you to track
any diet under the sun. This includes diet groups such as:

1\. Keto-ers: it automatically calculates net carbs for all foods, and lets
you set targets for this metric.

2\. Intermittent fasters: you can set different caloric and macro goals
depending on the day of the week. You can switch individual days easily.

3\. Cooks: creating recipes is very easy. Moreover, modifying or experimenting
with recipes as one-offs - while _still_ tracking them - is supported. I've
often cooked the same pasta only changing one ingredient. Or the proportions.

4\. Bulkers: athletes and people from all walks of life often want to _gain_
weight - in a controlled manner. Most diet trackers assume you want to lose
weight and build all UX towards that goal. Not Joy. Calculating what you need
to gain weight is even built into the app.

I also identified and developed features that would prove useful:

1\. No obnoxious ads slowing down the experience. Instead, charge money for a
service that interested people use every day. After announcing these changes,
feedback was largely positive.

2\. Nutritional data accuracy: I source from a few (commercial) providers, but
they're all professionally curated. The actual search algorithm needs work,
but once you land on an item, its data is vastly more accurate than many of
the user-contributed foods of the competition. Once I figure out a sustainable
approach for user-contributed foods - perhaps with a voting system à la Stack
Overflow - I will add this feature.

3\. Speed: the entire UX is built around being able to quickly log your food.
The harder and longer this takes, the more likely you are to deviate from your
diet plans. Joy does require some familiarization, but once you get the hang
of it, adding foods is incredibly quick. You can copy, cut, expand, contract,
and distribute meals in seconds. Repetition soon becomes second nature.

4\. Sharing: every individual piece of content should be shareable, not an all
or nothing approach like the alternatives. For example, here is one of my
favorite recipes, no login needed:
[https://www.joyapp.com/share/VMsGfhgdzvErmdqvxi8wSf/](https://www.joyapp.com/share/VMsGfhgdzvErmdqvxi8wSf/)

It's a web app, as well as an Android and iOS cordova app, see here:

1\. [https://www.joyapp.com](https://www.joyapp.com)

2\.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joyapp.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joyapp.android)

3\. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/joy-health-
tracker/id9551727...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/joy-health-
tracker/id955172784?ls=1&mt=8)

I'll be around for questions all day. Enjoy!

~~~
j-hernandez
Taking a look around now - any plans to integrate with fitness trackers? I'd
love to have this manage my diet and post my daily caloric intake to Fitbit.
Right now I use MyFitnessPal and it submits to Fitbit, but tracking my diet in
MFP is fairly cumbersome - although in fairness it is a very difficult problem
to solve from the perspectives of design and UX.

~~~
silviogutierrez
Great question! While I've considered being able to _track_ exercise (just for
progression in that area), I purposely left out exercise calories affecting
day calories. 99% of people that "make up/eat back" the calories they burn off
by exercise end up overeating them. Ultimately defeating their goals to lose
weight.

There are exceptions (I imagine yourself included). But that's a summary of
why it's not accounted for. A much better system is for people to set an
activity level and just adjust based on weight loss or weight gain. Basically,
looking for a trend line in the reports section. Of course, that area itself
could be improved (and will be improved).

~~~
j-hernandez
I'd actually be cool with just a daily ping of Fitbit (spitballing) with my
caloric intake for the day and not even attempting to track exercise/burn. I
totally get not wanting to track daily calories against exercise calories. It
turns into this whole "workout to eat/eat to workout" thing, which is wholly
counter productive considering the goals that fitness apps represent.

I do like the idea of a "push to fitbit" \- but only at the end of the day,
and without the ability to edit. One might track their foods a little
differently if they saw they were 10 calories away from going over. ("Well,
that sandwich didn't really have all too much of X on it")

I actually hadn't considered using this to track exercise or calorie burn. I
like the idea of separating the two, and joining the data later to get (as
close as you can get at least) an accurate representation of caloric I/O.
Historically, tracking anything more than those two singular ultimate values
(or even just one of them) results in a really bloated app that makes tracking
way too complicated.

An interesting thing would be an exercise tracking app based on the principles
presented here. UX 100% focused on data entry (which is by far the worst part
of tracking this kind of data), and very little else. Making exercise tracking
as simple as scribbling down onto your notepad on the bench between sets (or
whatever your process is).

From there, you can take your calories burned as it relates to your workouts,
and your caloric intake, and join them up in a way that makes sense to you.
Whether its through a ping to your Fitbit profile or a batch update to MFP or
even a blob of workout data over to Fitocracy for your badge fix (again,
spitballing).

Sorry for the ramble, excited to try this out.

~~~
silviogutierrez
Great suggestions all around. I'm actually a few days away from integrating
with HealthKit, which takes care of some low hanging fruit.

For example, I know that when I walk 10,000 steps a day (or run, dance, or
backflip), I burn my TDEE is around 2500 calories. However, on a very rainy
day like today, if I walk 0 steps - a true sedentary day - it would definitely
impact my TDEE. I'd argue even enough to not average out in the long term.

Sure, 7500 one day and 12000 the next averages out. But 0? Imagine a rainy
week? So in that case, proper integration and adjustment of your targets for
the day would be useful.

I imagine something similar could be done for fitbit, etc.

Another low hanging fruit is integrating with scales: manually entering my
weight every day is easily automated.

I do plan to eventually add exercise tracking for progression, but as we
agree, encouraging "the eat back what you burn off" is not a good direction
for most.

