Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of js/jquery in the front, django in the back.
Nice that it's holding up so well!
It hasn't fallen yet, but I had no idea hackernews would hit my servers this hard. Fingers crossed.
Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
31–40 of 296 posts
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#32There'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 c…
No, it's a commonly unbalanced US meal. (and is ~1.5 people's worth of calories.) But it doesn' seem do different from your example: meat, vegetable, dairy, starch, sweet.
And the Nutrition guide's recommended protein level is insanely high.
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#33There'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 c…
No, it's a commonly unbalanced US meal. (and is ~1.5 people's worth of calories.) But it doesn' seem do different from your example: meat, vegetable, dairy, starch, sweet. And the Nutrition guide's recommended protein level is insanely high.
Well in my example, you get 2 servings of vegetable and 2 servings of fruit a day (with potentially 1 or 2 more for breakfast + snack)– here we barely have 2 portions of fruit/vegetable.
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#34So 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?"
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How long has the service been around for, and how did you get traction? You have quite a lot of Twitter and Facebook followers/fans.
It started out as Swole.me (http://www.swole.me) a little over two years ago, and then I rebranded it once the algorithm was good enough to suggest things a normal, well adjusted person might eat (as opposed to a meal of 2 tbsp peanut butter + 1 chicken breast). My guess is that the idea and execution was novel enough to get it a decent amount of attention.
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#36There'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 c…
The default (33%/33%/33%) carb/protein/fat split is similar to that proposed by the Zone diet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_diet
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#37There'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 c…
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.
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#38There'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 c…
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?
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#39The 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.
Re: Show HN: Automatic weekly meal planner, also plans your leftovers
#40There'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 c…
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.