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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

#91

Post by rcfox »

I've tried to make a meal planner that used linear programming to ensure that I got all of the needed nutrients and minimized calories, but it didn't work out. It really liked to suggest moose meat and some insanely healthful fruit from Argentina. It also suggested I drink 642 cups of coffee a day, I guess because coffee has some trace amount of whatever nutrient everything else lacked.

It was also difficult to figure out exactly how much of each nutrient I needed. There is no one list that has all of the nutrients, and different lists that cover different nutrients suggest different amounts of the nutrients that intersect the lists.

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

#92

Post by lemming »

GuiA wrote: post #45
smspence wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then just add some extra vegetables and fruit, if that's what you want...

I think you're misinterpreting my comment. My culture and upbringing have given me broad indications on what consists "eating healthily"; here I am seeing a tool made by a citizen of another culture, that claims it will produce healthy meal recommendations. But the recommendations it gives me are wildly different from my cultural expectations. All I'm trying to do is understand why there is this discrepancy.

This is a pretty interesting question IMO. I spent 8 years living in Spain where people are convinced that their diet is the healthiest in the world, but by any "modern" standard is a nutritionist's nightmare: often no breakfast and fatty/sugary if you do eat it, tons of coffee, generally extremely high levels of fat including saturated animal fats, very high in salt and alcohol. Nearly all carbs are white and processed, very few vegetables. Breakfast, if eaten, is normally 10am, lunch at 2pm-4pm, and dinner at 9pm-10pm. No-one sleeps 8 hours.

That said, it does have some remediating factors - generally lots of fish and olive oil and (much) smaller portion sizes than the US. Also my cardiologist here in New Zealand said that they have a much lower incidence of heart disease than you would expect given the above, and no-one knows why. Maybe it's genetic, maybe olive oil is better for us than we currently understand.

Interesting stuff.

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

#95

Post by lemming »

One thing that would be really useful would be a "family mode". My wife and I are currently working out together. I want to gain weight, she wants to lose or maintain weight while losing fat and gaining muscle. We always eat together and it's unrealistic for us to cook two different meals every time. Ideally it could propose a meal for two at least for the main 3 meals and tell us the proportion of the meal that she should be eating (since the composition will probably be similar, just the quantity will differ).

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

#96

Post by papa_bear »

alepper wrote: post #84

This is great, and really impressive. There's a couple minor things I'm looking for, in addition to all the things I looked for and found: - A 'regenerate all meals' button. Having generated, but then tweaked the meal options for every day, it seems I have to load & regenerate each day in turn? - Ability to customize frequency of automatic emails. I see that I can manually email a calendar range's plan, but I do most…

In your account page there's a "Reset meal plans" button, but it's more like letting you run through the signup process again - it will nuke any edits you've made to your templates to match what you put in the signup form. And I didn't think anyone would want to plan more than a week in advance, but I'll definitely consider it.

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

#97

Post by w1ntermute »

lemming wrote: post #95

One thing that would be really useful would be a "family mode". My wife and I are currently working out together. I want to gain weight, she wants to lose or maintain weight while losing fat and gaining muscle. We always eat together and it's unrealistic for us to cook two different meals every time. Ideally it could propose a meal for two at least for the main 3 meals and tell us the proportion of the meal that she…

You can increase the number of people in the meal settings: http://i.imgur.com/9JOlhCV.png

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

#98

Post by HorizonXP »

blocke wrote: post #58

Oh wow. Simply wow. I've wanted this without knowing I've wanted it. This probably sounds sad but the effort and potential anxiety required in trying to pick the right foods and what I might want to eat often means I just get lazy and eat out instead. A case where having an astounding number of options often leaves one wanting to pick none of the above. This is a great idea. Edit: Mobile website please!

I actually have wanted this for a long time, and seriously considered making it myself. I'm much happier that someone else did this.

You have one user already.

I love that you have presets for Atkins/Keto, and that you allow me to remove certain types of items like beef and pork. That has been sorely missing from others I've seen like this.

If you integrate this with Instacart, I would love you forever.

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

#99

Post by papa_bear »

lemming wrote: post #95

One thing that would be really useful would be a "family mode". My wife and I are currently working out together. I want to gain weight, she wants to lose or maintain weight while losing fat and gaining muscle. We always eat together and it's unrealistic for us to cook two different meals every time. Ideally it could propose a meal for two at least for the main 3 meals and tell us the proportion of the meal that she…

I added the family meal planning feature a few days ago, but it's more simple than what you're asking - it basically just scales up that meal X times in your grocery list, so the rest of your family is forced to eat whatever random meals my site spits out :-)

Something like an account link would be awesome, but would some serious complexity to my algorithm. Definitely something to shoot for though.

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

#100

Post by ericd »

orangethirty wrote: post #94

I want to pay you $10 a month to be able to use this. Please include a recipe/ingredients list for me to be able to go grocery shopping. Plus give me a weekly list of my meals so I dont have to think about what to cook or eat.

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