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Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

eatthismuch.com

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Re: Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

#81

Hard (both in difficulty and must-have) requirement: ability to exclude foods high in Vitamin K. A lot of us are on blood thinners (anti-coagulants, anti-clotting, Coumadin/warfarin). Vitamin K is the essence of blood clotting (coagulant, thickener); high quantity or wide variation can be dangerous (first symptom: stroke). Creating an interesting diet consistently very low in Vitamin K is important. Ability to specif…

To generalize from this very good point - perhaps a future iteration should include a fully-blinged-out "Advanced" settings menu that lets you add constraints for a wide variety of dietary restrictions, including micronutrient requirements, food allergies, and various modes of vegetarianism.

Re: Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

#84
The UI gets in the way of an interesting product. Nothing a little user testing couldn't solve, though!

I thought I'd suggest that you remove the underline from all of the lines at the top of the page, as it makes them all appear to be links and reduces readability. They will be just as prominent without that decoration, and it will actually make your sign up link more visible.

You may want to consider moving the sign up link to the entire phrase: "save your meal plans and make a grocery list ". People will probably click on that more often than the non-descriptive phrase "Sign Up". The latter phrase requires additional effort on the part of the user to read to text next to it, remember the sign up link, and make the decision to go back to the sign up link at the beginning of the phrase. It's worth a/b testing.

Interesting site!

Re: Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

#85
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never understood diets like this. They don't make evolutionary sense. There's only one diet logically that is ideal in my opinion, and I'd like to call it the food diet. Eat food. Eat natural, unmodified food. If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it. It's worth making more frequent trips to the grocery store to buy food that's real than to eat the non-food additives that make other…

> natural, unmodified food ie whole foods, and yes this is pretty much the only dieting advise you need.

No. The only dieting advice you need is to keep your calorie content in a reasonable range (roughly equal to expenditure to maintain weight, less than expenditure to lose) and make sure you're getting enough nutrients.

It's possible to lose weight on a Twinkie diet. The person who did also improved his cholesterol levels: His LDL dropped, his HDL went up, and his triglycerides went down.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/06/health/la-he-fitness...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

Re: Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

#86
post #33

just eat alkaline and you will be healthy

I have never understood diets like this. They don't make evolutionary sense. There's only one diet logically that is ideal in my opinion, and I'd like to call it the food diet. Eat food. Eat natural, unmodified food. If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it. It's worth making more frequent trips to the grocery store to buy food that's real than to eat the non-food additives that make other…

> If its processed and has things that aren't food in it, don't eat it.

This is wrong. It's nonsense, because humans aren't magical. We need a certain amount of nutrients, which we know, and calories, which we also know, and beyond that, we're fine, with rare exceptions. Anything else is unproven.

Re: Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

#88
post #48

From the fortune files: This is the first numerical problem I ever did. It demonstrates the power of computers: Enter lots of data on calorie & nutritive content of foods. Instruct the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a minimum level of each component, for fixed caloric content. The results are that one should eat each day: 1/2 chicken 1 egg 1 glass of skim milk 27 heads of lettuce. --…

I tried it and lunch was "2c. whole milk + .5c green beans" and dinner was fruit juice + potatoes.

Ah, computers.

Re: Show HN: App creates a meal plan that satisfies your nutrition constraints

#89

Awesome idea! Wish you could set your current weight and your target weight you want to go down or up to.

You can, its just slightly hidden. Under the "I want to eat X calories in X meals" there is a "not sure?" button. Click that and it will help you generate a target number for your calories.
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