****EDIT: URL for the new site: http://www.eatthismuch.com/
****Made some huge changes recently, including automatic weekly planning and automatic leftovers planning. Still a ways to go before it’s flawlessly managing my diet, but it’s getting there!
Hey dudes. Over the past couple weeks I’ve been making this diet generator website in my free time: http://swole.me/
It was mostly to learn javascript/programming, but I like how it turned out. The only problem is that I can’t tell how useful it is to other people. This is where you all come in!
I think if you live like the poor college cooking retard that I am, it can be pretty solid. If I check off brown rice, oatmeal, pasta, bananas, eggs, protein powder, round turkey, yogurt, peanut butter, and milk, the output looks surprisingly similar to how I eat.
On the other hand, some friends that I’ve shown it to think the foods given in the meal output are too random and they hate that the foods don’t go well together unless its by chance. Essentially, I’ve limited my audience to people of the bodybuilding community who only eat food to get the appropriate proportions of macronutrients.
So give me your feedback and I’ll try to make it more useful. Also, if you have any suggestions on the macro proportions, let me know. My choice of 25% calories from protein, 25 from fat, and 50 from carbs was kindof arbitrary, but it sounds close to ideal. I’ve seen some places advocate 55% from carbs, 20% from protein, and 25% from fat, or some minor variation of those proportions. Making the proportions flexible is probably the next thing I’ll put in.
Note: I also don’t think it works in IE9, but eff internet explorer. I wasted a day getting it to work in the older IE versions, and then microsoft releases a new version like a week ago with a whole new batch of problems
UPDATES (7/6/11):
I just finished a pretty big update with a food sandbox mode. You can generate a meal plan with the generator and then send it to the sandbox mode for editing with a drag and drop interface.
I’ve got a pretty extensive timeline of updates to make, the soonest probably being the ability to add your own custom food objects, followed by better generated diets, vegetable recommendations based on micronutrients, and a better saving/account system. Metric units will have to be thrown in there somewhere too. Let me know if you have any feedback on the changes, especially if anything doesn’t work for you. I haven’t even tested it in internet explorer, so I’ll probably get on that in the morning.
UPDATES (10/6/11):
After almost 3 months I’ve managed to push another update. Now there are separate breakfast menus and vegetable recommendations based on micronutrients, along with a snazzy new look. I’m going to be making more incremental updates from now on, so check it out every now and then to see what’s changed, and I’ll post about it here!
UPDATES (3/10/12):
I totally failed to follow through on the more frequent updates thing, but I finally made another update today. I finished adding a food database, you can add custom foods, decide which foods the generator picks in each meal, and change the units for each food. You can also add foods, lock them in place, and then use the generate function as an “autocomplete.”
It’s come a long way since I started a year ago, and it’s finally becoming a pretty reasonable diet planner. You guys were my initial inspiration, so it’d be great if I could get your continued feedback. Try it out and let me know what you think!
UPDATES (8/4/12):
This last update was a long time coming, but I just launched a new version at http://www.eatthismuch.com/ . The biggest change is a much more intelligent algorithm, recipes, and more extensive food options. Also, I attempted to implement a business model! Give it a try and let me know what you think. At the moment, the recipe selection is a bit limited, but as people enter more of their own I’ll add them to the pool of recipes the generator draws from. So if you have some decent recipes (especially simple ones), please enter them with some decently written directions.
UPDATES (5/6/13):
Damn, it’s been over 2 years since I started this! Eat This Much has gone through some major changes since last August, the biggest being automatic weekly planning. Now, if you sign up, it’ll send you a 7 day meal plan and grocery list every week via email. If you see anything you don’t like, you can load up the day in the generator and make edits on the spot. Once you like what you see, you can resend yourself the email. If it suggests any big recipes, it’ll ask you to save the extra servings as leftovers and eat them over the next few days.
The weekly stuff isn’t free (if you guys don’t burn me at the stake, I’ll build a coupon system and pass some out here!), but the free version of the generator has also seen some big improvements since the launch and makes much more reasonable looking plans. Would love to hear what you guys think about it.
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Try it out and give me your feedback!