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Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

swole.me

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Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#53
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.

Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#54
post #23

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...?)

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.

Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#55
This is great -- but I'd really like to see reasoning for the choices accompany recommendations. Maybe some citations to nutritional sources. If I'm going to be eating what someone tells me to eat, I want to be able to understand what's behind their recommendations and why they believe them to be sound.

Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#56
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.

Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#57

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.

+1 for the ability to select only vegan options.

Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#58
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/

Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#59
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

Re: Swole.me - The automatic diet planner

#60
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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