Squire

Inspiration

Coming to the United States from our home countries, we've encountered a big cultural difference, especially food, and such drastic changes make it hard to maintain nutritional wellness. However, keeping track of your macronutrients and calories can be a lot more difficult to stay in fit. We weren't really sure what kinds of food recipes were effective in losing weight and keeping track of our health, since a lot of foods that seemed light or healthy sometimes ended up being a lot more calorie-dense than it seemed. Therefore, we thought it would be a good idea to have an app that integrates a fitness tracking app a recipe suggesting app, so whatever recipe that was suggested in the app can be trusted to help you lose weight and stay fit.

What it does

Our app keeps track of the macronutrients as well as the calories that the user can consume in a day. Then, we have a search bar where you can type in the type of food that you want to eat, and then we have AI give suggestions on a recipe, then it logs the calories and the macros of it. Then, using that, we would know how much of our daily calories and macros we have consumed, which will then be used to better calculate the best recipe for the other meals in the day, making sure the user can make a recipe to help them achieve their fitness goals. The app also keeps track of any recipes that they have eaten in the past 7 days, to keep track of their recent progress.

How we built it

By taking into account a user's personal tastes, current macronutrient limits for the day, ingredients present at home and whatever their craving is at the time, we format those specific requirements into a prompt for the Gemini LLM API, which would then suggest a recipe based on those goals!

Challenges we ran into

A majority of the team was inexperienced in a lot of the tools required for fullstack development such as React, NodeJs and Express, so there were a lot of learning that had to go along the way, which made it so doing basic tasks could sometimes take a lot of time, whereas an experienced programmer may not struggle with. Also, towards the beginning, we had a lot of issues with github and merge conflicts, making it a pain to just push or pull our change that we have each made.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given how this is our first ever hackathon and how inexperienced we were, we believe that we were able to learn a lot along the way, and we were able to push ourselves to our limits and do as much as we could do in the limited time we had. Even so, on the last day, we were able to keep on working for hours and hours nonstop with very little breaks, so we feel quite happy about our resilience.

What we learned

We've learned that learning is a challenging but rewarding experience. Some of us had believed that coding was more of an individual task where one immerses themselves, and as much as we might still believe this, having someone right next to you that can help you when you are ever in trouble is such a powerful tool, and especially when that person is your friend, I was able to enjoy the moment more and survive through the full 36 hours of the hackathon.

Pair-programming yayyyy!!!

What's next for Squire

One of the members was really into health and fitness at one point, and he realized that if you want to lose weight in a healthy manner, a lot of things that people may have previously told you are wrong! For example, if you want to lose weight, you should eat more in the morning! Who knew? Likewise, if you are trying to cut down on fats, you should consume MORE protein than you should when you are trying to maintain weight! Also, the ideal ratio of proteins to fats to carbohydrates (in kcal) is around 3:2:5, and proteins and carbohydrates have about 4kcal/gram, whereas fats have about 9kcal/gram, so that can be used to calculate how many grams are required to make up your diet. However, all of this is really complicated, and even as someone who loves doing math in their heads, it can be too much to be thinking about what you ate, like "Oh, I ate one egg so that's about 6g of protein and 5g of fats!" or "I had 100g of chicken breast so that's about 30g of protein!" Obviously nobody is going to be doing that, so having an app that does all of this for you is revolutionary to achieving not just weight loss, but healthy weight loss such that it minimizes your muscle loss, which could help prevent weight rebounds drastically. Therefore, I believe that this app has a lot of potential to revolutionize how people view and approach fitness, and we are very optimistic of what the future holds for Squire. It's basically having a personal fitness trainer in the palm of your hands, without the crazy fees! What more can one ask for ?

Discord usernames: @yesyesokay @oreocraft @azmudcat

Built With

• express.js
• gemini
• knot
• mongodb
• mongoose
• next.js
• node.js
• tailwind