
Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers - papa_bear
http://www.eatthismuch.com
======
27182818284
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
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.

~~~
unreal37
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.

[1] [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/how-many-
carbohyd...](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/nutrition/how-many-
carbohydrates-do-you-need.html)

~~~
papa_bear
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.

~~~
tracker1
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)

~~~
kemayo
That already seems to be there. I see a "target micronutrients" setting, which
lets me set the min / max of carbs / fats / proteins for each day.

------
blocke
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
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
The site doesn't seem to include drinks. Do you plan on adding them?

~~~
papa_bear
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.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
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.

------
papa_bear
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
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
Yeah. I just bookmarked it for later, because this has me really excited! Good
luck!

------
noonespecial
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
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
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 :)

------
physcab
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
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
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.

------
rcfox
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
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
To be honest, I don't remember... I think I was using a Linux command-line LP
solver.

------
lemming
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).

~~~
papa_bear
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
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! :)

------
nemo1618
Really cool! Needs a Rob Rhinehart mode though...

Breakfast: Soylent, 20 oz.

Lunch: Soylent, 20 oz.

Dinner: Soylent, 20 oz.

~~~
brunorsini
you totally stole my joke :)

------
SoftwareMaven
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
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
It does, but he's right about the abundance of pecans and bacon. Adding more
low carb options is one of my top priorities.

------
GuiA
There's probably a culture clash here but... is this considered a balanced
nutritious meal in the US?

<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.

~~~
cocoflunchy
Yes, it looks like it's picking 3 random "parts of meal" but not necessarily
in 3 different categories...

But maybe it's also linked to the fact that you're asking for 3400 calories?
2500 seems more reasonable for an adult male.

~~~
GuiA
I don't know how much calories I need, I gave it my stats (23 yo male,
moderately active, 85 kg, 1m 86) and it auto-populated the field for me.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
‘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.

------
cjoh
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
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).

~~~
gterrill
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/>

------
matthiaswh
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.

------
Jemaclus
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
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
Ah, cool! Didn't even see that.

------
orangethirty
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
That's exactly what it does, except for $9/mo :-D

~~~
orangethirty
Increase the price.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
_increase the price_

The creator is drastically underestimating how much removing this pain point
is worth to people.

~~~
ericd
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
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
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.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
Always have a version that has what seems like just plain stupidly high
pricing. Many people wind up getting the majority of their revenue from such
an option.

~~~
ericd
Ah yeah, I remember that from Patio11's Business of Software talk. I was under
the impression that that was mostly for B2B SAAS startups, though, largely due
to corporate politics and things like SLA requirements, and just generally not
caring a whole lot about money. B2C is a whole different ballgame. If I'm
wrong, though, I'd really like to know.

There's also the potential to make this B2B with nutritionists/personal
trainers/etc, so your point isn't lost in any case.

~~~
joverholt
Never underestimate someone's behavior of wanting the "best".

------
mahyarm
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
In Australia there's already a service doing premade meal plans with delivery
to a common dropoff point: <http://musclemealsdirect.com.au/>

------
greghinch
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
I noticed that as well. You can refresh the meal until it makes some sense,
though.

------
k3n
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!

------
utunga
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.

------
kenjackson
Well done. Maybe the first Show HN app I've ever sent to family and friends.

------
sravfeyn
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
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.

------
bernz
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
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.

~~~
stmchn
Have you considered using Open Recipes?
<https://github.com/fictivekin/openrecipes>

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>

------
Catchpowle
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/>

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/>

Again, great job, best of luck!

------
marianov
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
I really wouldn't bother starting down the road of trying to classify meal
other than breakfast by name.

------
swalsh
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.

~~~
pplante
For me the ability to shop on the weekends would make using this easier.

~~~
papa_bear
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.

------
cwilson
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
Charge $10/mo for it and shoo the investors away as your money comes pouring
in.

------
alepper
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
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.

------
lynxnathan
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!

------
w1ntermute
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).

------
Shivetya
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
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.

------
mietek
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?

------
RK
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?

------
dacilselig
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.

------
deskglass
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
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.

------
fijal
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?

------
dr_
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.

------
Guthur
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.

------
realrocker
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.

------
13hours
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.

------
RavneetGrewal
Impressed. As others have said, there is a option for everything that came to
my mind (vegetarian here). Good work. Will use this.

------
Felix21
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

------
bm1362
Awesome- I was considering doing something like this as well. After following
the Soylent posts (<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?

------
theboss
I will give you all of my money if you include support for dietary
restrictions. I have food allergies and can't consume milk.

~~~
papa_bear
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
Well I guess I owe you a lot of money.....

------
triplepoint217
Have you considered parsing the Diabetes guidelines so that you could add an
entry for people needing to follow that diet.

------
fluts
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.

------
prawn
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."

------
josephjrobison
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.

------
short_circut
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
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?

------
mauricesvay
Looks very comprehensive, with recipes, meal price, and food options. You even
thought about vegans. Great job!

------
stmchn
This is great! I've seen a couple similar sites but not anything nearly as
well executed as this. Good job!

------
nicolethenerd
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?)

------
dgudkov
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.

------
mistermann
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)

------
twanlass
Seriously awesome. I have to say though, you're not charging enough! Find a
reason to add another tier!

------
Shivetya
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.

------
jvanderwal
I was just looking for this kind of information the other day. Is there a way
to give it a budget?

~~~
papa_bear
At the very bottom of the meal options page you can set a daily price limit.

------
jordan_clark
This is actually really, really useful. Even pulls in the recipes.. Excellent
work. _claps_

------
helloburin
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.

------
awjr
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.

------
nilkn
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.

------
patrickod
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

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
moeamaya
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.

------
brntn
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.

------
k__
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.

------
edouard1234567
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
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>

[2] <http://tapbots.com/software/weightbot/>

[3] <http://www.withings.com/api>

------
clavalle
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.

------
nawitus
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.

------
ylem
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
+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.

------
Kluny
This is awesome. It needs a "vegetarian" or "broke" feature.

~~~
frakkingcylons
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.

------
kidsil
+1 for adding custom filtering options (Vegan, Paleo, etc.)

------
ylem
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)

------
coob
Very impressed. However, I had to laugh at this meal suggestion:

<http://imgur.com/tVz5WCp>

Not two things that usually go together!

~~~
mikegreco
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-...](http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/melon-wrapped-in-
prosciutto-recipe/index.html)

------
_halcyon_
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.

------
nathanb
Very, very cool. Amazingly polished, and takes a lot of different dietary
needs into account. Thanks for making and sharing!

------
andrewmb
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
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.

------
fluts
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.

------
chmullig
Connect it to Fresh Direct (and understand the quantities things are actually
sold in?) and I'd be in love...

------
serf
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.

------
pratikjhaveri
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
I think part of the problem is getting many times normal traffic and not being
provisioned for that :-)

------
xarien
Well done, but my initial trials kept suggesting a diet that was too high in
carbs and too low in protein.

------
mhahn
this would be awesome if it had an integration with instacart, ie. you send me
the groceries every week

------
RakshaC
Really impressive. Hope to get the Mobile app soon. Any plans for other recipe
sites integration?

~~~
papa_bear
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.

------
fatjokes
Brilliant! Add a couples option for registration! Like, a small discount over
$9/person x 2 ppl.

------
JungleGymSam
This is very very cool. You've made a really well thought out service with
this. Congrats.

------
akoumjian
I am really impressed with the meal suggestions it is giving me, using the
keto option.

------
RyanIyengar
Great site! I can see it being super useful.

edit: Can you integrate into Google calendar at all?

------
jongold
Been using this site since it was Swole.me - brilliant, thanks so much :)

------
gburt
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.

------
cx42net
Great work! I can't imagine the hours you spent building it ! :)

------
Heliosmaster
I thought about this a while ago, some sort of smart pantry! :D

------
tacticus
This is awesome i am really impressed. Signed up right now

------
philip1209
How is this made? A binary integer programming model?

------
intended
The reddit link to fitness/faq seems to be broken.

------
kintamanimatt
What's your stack?

~~~
papa_bear
A lot of js/jquery in the front, django in the back.

~~~
kintamanimatt
Nice that it's holding up so well!

~~~
papa_bear
It hasn't fallen yet, but I had no idea hackernews would hit my servers this
hard. Fingers crossed.

~~~
kintamanimatt
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.

------
merusame
Awesome tool, could turn out very successful.

------
rrinorl
Are you looking for any more developers?

------
niico
"Make what people want" at its best.

------
jaynos
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
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.

------
MrGrillet
Great job. Really simple to use.

------
instakill
There is no mince on the menu :(

------
patpatpat
You have a user, I love this.

------
shivaas
really good stuff! gonna give it a shot next week for my meal planning

------
saiko-chriskun
man I was about to start building this exact thing hahah. nice work!

------
tchen
this is a cool improvement from swole. great work

------
wsujosh
This is awesome.

------
tallon
This is amazing.

------
crackbaby
spartansupper.com runs a twitter feed that generates nutritionally (20+
nutrients) complete diets with calorie/carb/protein constraints

------
shloime
Genius.

------
snake_plissken
this. is. amazing.

------
ahoyhere
If you don't love automagic, you should check out <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.

------
dreamdu5t
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.

~~~
papa_bear
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.

------
andyfang
asdf

------
richkuo
zyzz brah

------
dpcan
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
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.

