Poodle, the automatic nutrition plan builder

users enter their stats(weight, activity, goals..etc) and get a recommended nutrition plan to reach their goals

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Inspiration

I needed a better way to track my nutrition while I was training. There are A LOT of apps that track your food for you, meaning you eat something and then get the macronutrient count from a DB. There are not any good ones that give you a suggestion for how many calories to take in and then build daily plans around that.

What it does

A user enters in their Stats ( height, weight, age, activity level and goals(lose weight, gain mass) ), from this the system is able to calculate how much they should eat in a given day to reach their goals. A user can choose to "create a meal plan" where the system will find the best recipes to suggest. From here the user chooses which recipes they would want to eat on a weekly basis and then the plan is generated.

How I built it

The system stack is Rails for the backend and HTML/JS for the front-end.

Challenges I ran into

HOW TO EXTRACT DATA. I spent a majority of my time trying to find an algorithm that would match recipes to a users daily macro needs. I came to learn that these algorithms mean nothing without data :/ I should have spent more time building out a crawler to extract recipes from sites and then built my system around that. I think that would have saved me some 3AM headaches

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Getting an MVP working in 36hrs.
  • Also showing it to people and having them say "let me know when you put that online, I would use something like that"

What I learned

  • Trying to create a system that suggests meal plans for people(as a nutritionist would) is not as easy as I thought.
  • sleep > no sleep
  • I WISH I FORMED A TEAM TO MAKE THIS WITH. I made the mistake of trying to build this myself, 10/10 would not do that again.

What's next for Poodle, the automatic nutrition plan builder

Better recommendations, a meal plan means nothing if you don't love the food on it.

"Chicken and Broccoli AGAIN" ~~~ (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Also building in restaurant recommendations into the system. Its pretty easy to stick to a plan for 1-2 weeks, but then everyone gets start to get lazy and slip. Thats when the spiral begins and next thing you know you find yourself at the KFC at 3 in morning the eating a family sized bucket of fried chicken from your '02 civic and listening to firework on repeat. We've all been there!

It would be awesome if there was a system that knew how much I should eat each meal. Then when I forget to pack food it can find restaurants within my walking distance and it could make meal recommendations for me. That way I can stick to my goals and never lose my ticket on the gain train.

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