Comment by joshgachnang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshgachnang | Hacker News Reader

A meal planning app for weight loss. I lost 50 pounds using calorie counting a few years ago. The thing that frustrated me most was trying to come up with meal plans every week. It's quite tedious to constantly find new recipes if you get bored with eating the same meals over and over. The weeks I planned ahead of time, I lost weight quickly. When I didn't plan I would stop losing weight, sometimes for months. So I'm trying to build an app that automatically builds a meal plan for you that you can then tweak.

There's a ton of problems when you're dealing with food though. Calculating calories of a recipe you find online can be tough. On one side, it's a natural language problem to extract the ingredient, the amount, the unit, and the prep/notes. On the other side, it's a data/data matching problem, where you need good data on a ton of ingredients, and then need to pick a reasonable one for "1 cup of milk".

And of course everyone eats and prepares food so differently that suggesting meals they'll actually enjoy is hard without asking them a bunch of questions first.

Not to discourage you but this seems like a tough sell. Most people gain weight because they don't want to plan out or make nutricious meals. The strategy I've always used is to figure out some small number of meals and then just pick one of them. It removes any mental load for shopping and cooking and you only have to figure it out once. It would be useful to suggest very very quick meals that are Y calories or less.

It's definitely not for everyone! But I know there are some people who just want to be told "go to the store, buy this stuff, you're going to be cooking these things these days if you want to lose weight". The same as a lot of people don't want to put in the work to do calorie counting through MyFitnessPal/others, but some people (including me!) swear by it.

Worst case, I developed an app I like using more than MyFitnessPal just for me and I'll still be quite happy.

I'm guessing you already know about them, but you might be able to get some useful ideas from Eat This Much[0], who I think is the biggest competitor in this space. It's a very complex challenge -- good luck!

[0]https://www.eatthismuch.com/

Oh yeah, they're pretty wonderful! Luckily, there's definitely enough room in this space for more than a few competitors. Thank you :)

I love this idea! I need a version that would also incorporate batch cooking so that I save time on cooking and make it easier to reach.

Oh yeah, that's pretty soon on my feature list! Something like "you're going to need to cook these nights, these nights are leftovers" and give you options to choose those and bias results towards eating the same thing every week day, etc to support things like Meal Prep Sunday.

So many of the other tools are just unrealistic for how I cook, which is cook like 4-5 times a week max and never for breakfast or lunch (unless it's ahead of time).

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