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

eatthismuch.com

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

#281

Post by unreal37 »

criley wrote: post #85
unreal37 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's a bit of a misnomer: diets like Keto don't "allow" set amounts of carbs, they require you to find your own carb limit to stay in ketosis. If you constantly blow out of ketosis, you'll literally accomplish nothing with the diet. Hence why keto-stix and other indicators are important- no one value works for everyone. I had to eat less than 25g/day to maintain the keto diet.

I think we're in agreement. Every person is slightly different in how they react to carbs, including how bad your insulin resistance has gotten and quickly your insulin reacts to blood sugar. We all know its about stopping insulin from being released ultimately.

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

#282

Post by unreal37 »

papa_bear wrote: post #86
unreal37 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Actually, its well known that low-carb diets have limited food choices. For instance, in Tim Ferriss' Four-Hour Body book, he goes so far as to suggest you eat the same 3 meals every day. It actually makes it easier if you just repeat the same meals over and over and over.

But of course, "the same meal over and over" is counter to the purpose of your web site, which is to suggest new meals. Great job, and I wish you success!

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

#283

Post by unreal37 »

GuiA wrote: post #40
cocoflunchy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Also, contrary to what you might think, even spending an hour per day in the gym weight lifting is not burning a lot of calories. It won't take you from 2300 calories expended per day to 3400, for instance.

One hour of weight training for a 200 lb man is only 450 calories burned, or a Medium Fries at McDonalds. You have to really be running or other high cardio sports to burn even 1000 calories per hour.

Working out has also been shown to cause people to eat more subconsciously, so those 450 calories burned end up being only 100-200 net calories burned once you've had the protein shake after the hard workout.

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

#284

Post by sc00ter »

dave_sont wrote: post #266
papa_bear wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked them about some kind of integration when I first launched, but because I had a pretty small userbase they dropped the conversation after a couple emails. Now that it's grown, maybe I'll prod them again.

Perhaps consider Postmates ( http://postmates.com/ ). They deliver a broad range of goods in SF and Seattle. Disclaimer - my friend works there. First pass impression: Good balance between meal-generation and customization. For me, I would lock in breakfast and one lunch, likely varying a late lunch and/or dinner. Your comment below about locking in a couple beers (say every Thurs or Fri happy hour) is a great exampl…

/Disclaimer/Disclosure/ - HN needs an app for that!

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

#285

Post by AnthonBerg »

orangethirty wrote: post #113
ericd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Increase the price.

$9 is perfect IMO. It completely removes the decision to buy or not – the psychological difference between $9 and $10 is greater than the numerical difference between 9 and 10.

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

#287

Post by itsybitsycoder »

GuiA wrote: post #41
smspence wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we know if your typical French meal is balanced or not, since you didn't indicate the portion size of any of those foods?

Idk, portion size seems fairly explicit in my post. This picture sums up nicely what a french meal would look like: http://i.imgur.com/5XRulJK.png With the appetizer plate topmost, dessert in the middle, main course at the bottom of the picture. It's also common for hungry/active people to have a second serving of the main course; a third helping would be rare.

So you eat all that twice a day, plus breakfast, plus sometimes seconds of the main? As a Canadian that looks like WAY too much food. Here it would be more common to eat one serving of what you call the main course (where veggies may be replaced by the salad), plus maybe an appetizer/fruit/bread. Desserts usually only special occasions or when you go out to a restaurant.

I wouldn't say that France has a reputation for eating healthy (and no wonder, sheesh), more a reputation for "gourmet" food. Personally I found that the site gave a fairly sane meal plan for a sane calorie range. Whether the site generated it for you or not, surely you realized 3500 kcal is not a sustainable amount for a sedentary person to eat?

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

#288

Post by itsybitsycoder »

papa_bear wrote: post #102
physcab wrote: post #78

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 f…

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 al…

I wouldn't say the site isn't basically functional. It seems like it's improved a lot since I first tried it out (it recommended I eat olive oil, and just olive oil, for lunch). Now it comes up with some interesting meal ideas I wouldn't have thought of myself.

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

#289

Post by xymostech »

pnathan wrote: post #275
cjoh wrote: post #70

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.

As a note to people, http://www.amazongrocer.com/ and http://fresh.amazon.com/ exist.

Amazon fresh seems to only be in Seattle at the moment. :(

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

#290

Post by lacksconfidence »

eru wrote: post #204
papa_bear wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> [...] to make it easier for me to gain weight. Always have a jar of peanut butter handy, and boiled eggs on hand, too. This way, you'll never have an excuse not to eat.

keeping around food i dont want to eat isnt going to help
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