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Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga

mathfood.com

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Re: Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga

#11

Post by jwally »

warcode wrote: post #7

I understand the minimum amount for protein while building muscle and the maximum amount of carbs for keto, but shouldn't the general use-case be to keep the amount of calories in check per meal? Making a meal consist of 1400 grams of carrots because there was an automatic ceiling on chicken due to protein seems silly. Seems like its a good app, but it needs sane defaults.

Thanks for the feedback! I tried showing it in the video (maybe needs more explanation) but you can set a max and a min on a diet item. Say you want to eat Egg whites, cheese, potatoes, and ketchup. Because ketchup and potatoes are both carbs the tool will probably choose one or the other; not both. What you could do is set a max on the amount of ketchup @ say 28 grams. That way all of your carbs aren't coming from ketchup.

Re: Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga

#12

Post by jwally »

Kiro wrote: post #5

This looks really cool but... Carbs, protein, fat and... cheese?

:D Was trying to demonstrate that its possible to set boundaries on the food items you pick. If I set the cheese requirement @ 0 (technically min=0, max=0), I can double the amount of bacon I get. It allows you to decide which is more important: Cheese or Bacon.

Re: Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga

#13

Post by jwally »

slykat wrote: post #4
jwally wrote: post #2

Would love some feed back on my first web-app. Thanks!

Technically, I should be really interested in this app as I've been spending the last few months trying to hack my diet. However, I tuned out after a few minutes. Specifically: * There is a huge wall of text. Most users (or at least me) want to learn what the product is by playing with it, not by reading. * Lots of form fields before you get value. I looked at the start point and immediately walked away. A large form…

Awesome points. Thanks for the feedback. You're right, target audience is pretty niche. Bodybuilders, figure athletes, gym rats, etc.

I probably didn't communicate it well but the value of the tool is this: How do you build a meal that meets your diet goals (fat, protein, carbs) given that foods have a mix of each type.

Re: Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga

#14

Post by ccccc0 »

Nice job! However I don't clearly understand the Results section. I mean, I can work it out, but it should be obvious.

With your supplied example, here was my train of thought when I hit solve: I get "Egg whites: 239.05". Am I supposed to eat 239 eggs? Probably not -- that's a lot for one meal. So there must be a unit; grams? well I don't know how much an egg weighs, plus I don't know the proportion of the white within a full egg. I certainly won't open Wikipedia right now to solve it!

That said, I love the design, especially the top illustration, so my point was just: if you can make the results more human-readable, that would help.

Re: Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga

#17

Post by jentulman »

This is generally quite nice. To add to some of the other feedback, I felt it could do with more verbose help text and more importantly for my brief play with it, more focus bringing basic staples to the top of results for food search.

I tried to add just bacon and it took rewatching the demo video and some guesswork to figure out searching for 'bacon raw' would get to basic bacon. Trying just 'bacon' or 'pork' only gets lots of babyfood and soup related answers in the generated dropdown.

Re: Show HN: Create a perfect meal with linear programminga

#20

Post by jwally »

jclos wrote: post #15

It looks nice, but I am not sure as to what new things it brings over, for example, eatthismuch.com (who generates menus from an already populated food database).

Thanks. I hadn't seen eatthismuch.com before. Very clever.

Eatthismuch (from what I've just now looked at) appears to approach the problem like this: "What are your diet goals? What kinds of foods do you like to eat? Ok. Here's a menu telling you what to eat."

There's a thing (that's starting to die down now) with nutrition called "if it fits your macros" meaning that you can eat anything that you want to eat (pizza, hot-dogs, hamburgers, tacos, etc) as long as your ratios are kept sturdy. Mathfood helps you do that.

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