AI Meal Planner

This web app allows users to input their weight, height, dietary preferences, and personal fitness goals, then generates customized meal plans that fit both their nutritional needs and budget.

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Inspiration

In today's fast-paced world, maintaining proper nutrition while balancing busy schedules has become increasingly challenging. We noticed that many people struggle with meal planning, often resorting to unhealthy fast food or repetitive meals due to lack of time, knowledge, or inspiration. Traditional nutrition apps either provide generic recommendations or require extensive manual input, making them impractical for daily use. Our team was inspired by the potential of AI to revolutionize personalized nutrition. We envisioned a platform that could understand individual dietary needs, preferences, and lifestyle constraints to generate customized meal plans that are both nutritionally optimal and practically achievable. With the rising awareness of health and wellness, especially post-pandemic, we saw an opportunity to democratize access to personalized nutrition guidance that was previously only available through expensive nutritionists and dietitians.

What it does

Our app is a meal planning platform that creates personalized, nutritionally-balanced meal plans tailored to each user's unique profile and goals.

Core Features: Comprehensive User Onboarding: Collects detailed user information including height, weight, age, sex, activity level, dietary restrictions, allergies, cooking time preferences, and fitness goals AI-Powered Meal Generation: Uses GPT-4o-mini to create customized daily and weekly meal plans based on user parameters Real-Time Nutrition Analysis: Integrates with Edamam Nutrition API to provide accurate macro and micronutrient data for every meal BMR-Based Calorie Targeting: Automatically calculates Basal Metabolic Rate and adjusts meal plans to align with user goals (weight loss, maintenance, or gain)

Login Workflow:

  1. Authentication: Secure sign-up/sign-in with NextAuth.js
  2. Onboarding: Complete profile setup with dietary preferences and goals
  3. Dashboard Access: View personalized profile summary with BMR and activity metrics
  4. Meal Plan Generation: Generate daily or weekly meal plans with one click
  5. Nutrition Insights: Access detailed nutritional breakdowns and daily totals

How we built it:

  • Frontend: Next.js 14 with App Router, React 18, Tailwind CSS for styling
  • Backend: Next.js API routes with serverless functions
  • Authentication: NextAuth.js for secure user management and session handling
  • AI Integration: OpenAI GPT-4o-mini for intelligent meal plan generation
  • Nutrition API: Edamam Nutrition Analysis API for accurate nutritional data

Challenges we ran into:

  • AI Consistency: Getting GPT-4o-mini to consistently return properly formatted JSON responses required extensive prompt engineering and error handling
  • API Integration: Managing multiple external APIs
  • Nutrition Data Accuracy: Ensuring ingredient formatting matches Edamam API expectations for accurate nutrition analysis
  • Session Management: Implementing secure session persistence with user profile updates after onboarding completion

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Actually having a product we could demo, Successful AI integration Real-time nutrition analysis

What we learned:

Time management :(

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