
Swole.me - The automatic diet planner - dwynings
http://swole.me/
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papa_bear
Hey everyone, I made this site. It's very much a work in progress, though if
your diet already looks as much like the generated output as it does mine, it
will be a great tool! (i.e. eat whatever I can find that barely needs cooking,
swallow a shot of olive oil, slight self hatred, etc.)

I would, however, like to learn to cook, so I'm working on implementing
recipes and a better food selection (it's clearly not worth learning unless I
build something to tell me what to eat and when). Let me know if you have any
feedback, and thanks.

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bobbles
Any chance on metric measurements? Does anyone use ounce as measurement except
the US?

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jsilence
Yes, metric please.

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haraball
In the FAQ it says: I used to, but I haven't had time to rework metric units
to use the USDA food database. The metric measurements can currently be seen
in the info tooltip next to each food.

But yes, I'd also like metric units.

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edw519
This is great! I once tried to do something like this but gave up because of
all the potential complexities. It looks like you have many of them covered.
This has a lot of potential if you expand it to "real world" living. A few
suggestions:

    
    
      - ability to create and save custom templates of choices (beyond Atkins...)
      - "ALL" toggle for each food group
      - database of commercial groceries (Heinz baked beans)
      - database of restaurant menus (Big Mac)
      - templates of meal types beyond "breakfast" (post workout, TV snack)
      - fix breakfast option (seems to ignore when chosen)
      - seasonal menus for produce
      - a way to cook meals for multiple people with their own preferences
      - Natural Hygiene (Fit for Life, Fuhrman) template
      - consider pricing
      - micronutrients beyond carbs, protein, fats
      - consider allergies
      - raw options
      - notifications (email, text, msg)
      - historic reporting with suggestions (especially daily calories)
      

Best wishes for a great product. Please keep us posted.

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VonLipwig
Would be nice to have a vegetarian / vegan option which quickly checks /
unchecks various things.

As a vege in one day I need to eat a lot of eggs and drink a lot of milk.

6 Eggs + 1 Cup Egg Whites + 3 Cups of Milk

I wonder how to make a meal out of this:

2 eggs Eggs + 1 cup Lentils + 30 grams Protein Powder + 1 cup Strawberries

I think it has potential though. Will be good when there are recipes.

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kokey
Omelet, humus (with a bit of pita bread), and drink the protein powder with
the strawberries in a smoothie.

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ericd
What a nice surprise! This is my brother's site. :-)

If you don't fancy eating lots of eggs, etc, you can go to the sandbox mode
and play around with combinations. He's planning on adding recipes soon.

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evolve2k
Yes I was recommended 8 eggs for breakfast!

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baby
Me 6. This is so unhealthy by the way, the yellow part contains far too much
cholesterol to be eaten on a daily basis.

edit: Seriously? I'm not trolling, ask any dietetic guy if he thinks it's
healthy eating that much eggs everyday.

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ericd
Not true: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776466>

You can always change the foods it's allowed to use, though, just hit the
Choose Foods button.

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nunb
Good link. There's plenty more (in pubmed) where that came from!

Seriously this 1980s alarmism needs to stop.

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ghc
This site is the second google result for swole, after the urban dictionary
definition of the term. I honestly don't like the name, and I think for most
people who have never heard the term this will bring to mind "swollen", not
"buff". Not a good word association for a diet planner.

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papa_bear
I feel mostly the same way, and I've spent a lot of time looking for a new one
so I'm open to suggestions. I managed to scoop up dietcal.com and
mealgorithm.com, and though I'm really into mealgorithm it seems a bit too
complicated.

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zargon
For dinner, it says I should have quinoa, wild rice, and chickpeas. I think it
would be more appetizing if it did its calculations on a recipe basis -- so
you'd get a menu plan composed of recipes selected to meet the given
requirements.

Even though I have all eggs and dairy unchecked, it still tells me to eat 6
eggs for breakfast.

I also take umbrage to the trend of confusing foods with macronutrients
(spinach is not carbs, meat is not protein, etc).
<http://www.foodpolitics.com/2012/01/peevish-about-protein/>

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PLejeck
It told me I should eat a cup of avocado and 2 cups of skim milk for dinner.
I'm confused and rather appalled by the thought of having that for any meal.

Additionally, I've heard stories of it telling people to eat 8 eggs for
breakfast, so I'm a bit wary.

(No, the 8 eggs for breakfast was not a diet for Gaston, either)

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ryanklee
I was told to eat 6 eggs for breakfast + yogurt (and banana?) as part of a 4
meal/2000 cal plan. I love eggs... but six?! That's just crazy talk.

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PLejeck
Well, to quote Gaston:

"When I was a lad I ate four dozen eggs, every morning to help me get large"

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sodiumphosphate
There are several comments here regarding the egg debate. Should you avoid
eating too many eggs? What is the impact of eggs and other sources of dietary
cholesterol on your blood cholesterol levels?

I've been wondering about this myself for some time, all the while eating
cartons of egg whites for breakfast every day.

ericd posted a link[1], which appears to be a good source of information (far
more than I have time to digest right now).

I only want to point out one small tidbit that I just found[2]; the American
Heart Association (according to the webmd article) recommends keeping your
dietary cholesterol intake below 300 milligrams per day. The same article
reports that a chicken egg contains about 200 milligrams of it.

Now, I'm totally agnostic about things that I don't have time to properly
research. In this case I would rather err on the side of caution, and will
continue to limit my cholesterol intake.

That said, this app is nice if you enjoy eating this way (a bit of this and a
bit of that; sans-recipe). This is pretty much how I normally eat, except that
I never measure my portions.

A nice (premium?) feature might be a journal where you can easily record what
you actually ate (in so much as it differs from the generated plan), your
weight, etc.

I don't know, but maybe with enough journal data you could infer something
about the user's metabolism (and average plan adherence), and make predictions
about weight change.

1\. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776466> 2\.
<http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/cholesterol-food>

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nunb
Your body makes most of the cholesterol in you, it's a vital pre-hormone.

How much you eat barely changes the amount produced by your body.

If you want a better lipid profile, eat more eggs and fewer carbs.

Everything above is really well established fact at this point, propagandists
like AHA to the contrary.

When in doubt, ask the practitioners, at say, leangains.com

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jacques_chester
The AHA is probably exercising risk management. While dietary cholesterol
doesn't affect blood cholesterol for most people, for _some_ people (hyper-
responders) it _does_ raise blood cholesterol. Which is a bad thing.

So rather than saying "for most people it's OK, but be sure to get some fiddly
blood work done a few times!", the AHA just says "don't do it, in case you're
a hyper-responder".

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rdouble
The studies regarding eggs and cholesterol compare the effects of eating one
or two eggs per day to the effects of eating none. There is not much
difference between the two diets being compared. There are no studies that
compare the effects of an egg free diet to the effects of eating 6-12 eggs per
day. If you are eating a bodybuilder diet it's worth getting a metabolic panel
to get an idea of what's happening inside.

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bambax
When clicking on the "not sure" link to determine how many calories we want
per day, one is given a choice between Imperial and Metric units; but in the
generated diets this choice is apparently not present?

(Also, what is a "cup"? and how many avocados does it hold...?)

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alextgordon
1 cup = 236 ml. According to Wolfram Alpha, an avocado has a density of 0.97
g/ml, so it's roughly 229 grams. Average weight of an avocado is 210 grams.

It's 1 avocado.

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forbes
It recommended that I have 1 cup of avocado and 1 cup of cottage cheese for
lunch. No thanks.

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itmag
I saw this a few months back on r/fitness - nice progress!

I'm curious about your tech stack. Mind sharing? :)

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nunb
I too would like to know more.

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papa_bear
It's currently all javascript/jquery and PHP, though I'm moving the backend to
Django. I'm also messing around with backbone.js, but haven't been able to
push myself to make the switch yet.

~~~
itmag
What about the design?

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brador
At first I was like, yawn...another recipe site...then I tried it. This is
awesome! From the pie charts to the info popups, it's clear you've polished
this a fair bit.

There's so much more that can be done with this good luck and keep at it!

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jasonlotito
Like the idea and site. Issues I had:

I signed up. Thank you for making signup and logging in easy. However, I was
then presented with this page:

<http://swole.me/account.php>

However, this page (logged in, mind you):

<http://swole.me/>

Would have been better, at least on the initial log in.

The Not Sure? button got lost. I didn't notice it. In fact, I'd written out a
suggestion for you to do the exact thing you did with the popup and
calculator. Maybe change the text to "Figure out how many calories you need"
or something like that. Something more accurate.

Overall though, a great start.

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dedene
Very nice!

Any plans for a mobile version? (iPhone / Android) I can imagine this has even
more value when you have it around all the time on your mobile, combined with
push notifications?

Good luck with the app!

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papa_bear
Thanks! I'd definitely like to at some point. What did you have in mind for
the push notifications? "4pm. Eat some nuts!"?

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jdg
As a huge fan of swole.me and long-time lurker of it - you could add in push
notifications right now using Boxcar (boxcar.io). Disclosure: I helped build
it. ;)

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saiko-chriskun
zomg this is awesome! :D

I was actually about to start building something really similar to this.
basically the recipe part your blog mentions- you'd throw in everything you
have in your kitchen and it'd spit out stuff you can make with it.

but yeah I've been in the eating healthier / start cooking more mood recently,
but also starting to be more active, so I wanted to make sure I was getting
everything I needed. Calculating all of the nutrients/vitamins/minerals by
hand sucks!

tldr- this app is awesome. good luck with it :)

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dwynings
To be clear, I didn't make it – just found it!

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mvkel
As a competitive cyclist, this is pretty awesome.

Less thinking about what I need to eat and more eating. Huge time saver.

How much science is behind this? It'd be nice to see some kind of "weekly
exercise level" worked into this, with some suggested on-day/off-day caloric
intake recommendations PLUS the actual food bit.

EDIT: Just read deeper into how it's deriving the numbers. Top-notch. Hoping I
can work this into my daily routine. A "weekly grocery list" option would be
sweet.

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dnlhoust
Just a quick reminder for some, a diet as a means to an end very well may have
a strange set of meals in order to meet the criteria for weight loss/mass
gain. As nice as it'd be to eat 2000kcals and have a steak and potatoes for
dinner everyday, you may instead have to eat that cup of avocado and a glass
of milk for its nutritional value:kcal

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Karunamon
Awesome app! This is going straight onto my bookmarks bar.

Only thing I can think of adding straight off is a button to copy your menu
selections to the other side. If I tweak the menu settings for breakfast, I
have to re-tweak them the same way for the other meals.

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jaggederest
Awesome, I'm totally going to use this - I hate diet sites that don't let me
easily configure what I have on hand, or want to eat. "No, cottage cheese is
not a good idea when you are lactose intolerant, thanks."

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anrope
I like the site.

I would like to see multiple options for each element of a meal, in the
interest of not eating the same meal each day.

For instance:

    
    
      chicken breast or ground beef
      
      wild rice or baked potato
    

Good work!

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hook
The recommended meal (4 eggs, 12 oz chicken breast) gives me 1100mg of
cholesterol, which is more than 3 times the daily recommended maximum.

Great for Pfitzer (makers of Lipitor), not so great for your heart.

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mahyarm
The HDL/LDL ratio of eggs are even, and your body creates cholesterol if you
don't eat any, and reduces it's cholesterol production if you do to
compensate.

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svdad
Damn, I was thinking about building something like this. But seriously, it
looks very cool. Looking forward to playing with it.

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xarien
It told me that I need to be on the skim milk diet.... Too bad it can't be
used in conjunction with the cookie diet...

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mahyarm
Let us add custom foods. I have these %50 fat and %50 protein cheese sticks at
work that make awesome keto snacks.

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yummybear
Meal 4: 1 cup Cottage Cheese

So for dinner I'm having 1 cup of cottage cheese? Not very original, how about
an actual cooked meal?

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RickFromSA
Needs a little refinement. It's suggesting I eat 6 eggs a day and while I am
no expert, that sounds excessive.

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ericd
The whole cholesterol in eggs thing is actually not really that big a deal:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776466> (basically says that dietary
cholesterol intake levels are unlinked from blood cholesterol in 75% of the
population, and that it has been shown to inhibit atherogenesis/artery plaque
formation)

Besides that, since they're made to carry something from a bundle of cells to
full organism, they're chock full of a full set of micro and macronutrients.

This started as a site for body builders, though, and it's only now broadening
to normal foods.

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nunb
I really like the "raw" body-builder flavor to it: eat a cup of kale, eat a
cup of almonds etc., so I hope if recipes do come in, they can somehow be
turned off.

I just recommended it to reddit.com/r/leangains :-) though apparently it's
been posted on /r/fitness before.

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swah
Let me blacklist specific foods!

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ericd
You can, hit the Choose Foods button.

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bmccormack
I loved the Paleo button. Made it a lot easier to get started!

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davidcollantes
Love it. Have not signed up, please offer OpenID...

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vaksel
the name is kinda bad

kinda says swollen, which would implicate that you actually get fatter.

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sparky
I'm guessing the name is a play on 'swoll', which colloquially means
'muscular'.

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=swoll>

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nightwatch77
this site eats 100% CPU in chrome

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sodiumphosphate
I'm running the latest (16.0.912.77) on Mac OS X, and not seeing any issue. It
does jump to about 25% CPU when I click 'Generate', but only for about a
second.

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rickdale
Slow Carb Diet , representing

