Software project

Hi guys!

I'm a software engineer and whenever I've read a very detailed books in the field of nutrition or training I've always felt the urge to program them (in fact I did some).

In this topic I would like to get some ideas. What program would make you guys happy?

A program that takes as input a scholarly article on nutrition or exercise programming and as output provides a short summary of what, if any, meaningful findings were made.

A program to upload a picture of what you are eating and returns the precise nutrient content.

Maybe something as simple as an app that reminds you to eat regularly. I quite often find I get busy and by the time I realise I'm hungry it's been 4 or 5 hours since I ate a proper meal. 

You could just hit a button when you eat and it will start a timer for 3 hours (possibly user adjustable depending on their dietary regime, or even if it took into account how many calories you'd just eaten), and notify you at 2.5 hours that you are due to eat again soon, and again at 3 hours and every 15 minutes after 3 hours.

Not eating enough or regularly enough is probably one of the most common barriers to us fitness enthusiasts who are trying to build up strength and body mass so if we had an app nagging us to eat we could get some help upregulating our dietary habits.

Joshua Slocum said:

A program that takes as input a scholarly article on nutrition or exercise programming and as output provides a short summary of what, if any, meaningful findings were made.

Theoritically something like that could be done. If we could come up with a model what most physiological process could fit into then we could just read an article and refactor the code every time.

FredInChina said:

A program to upload a picture of what you are eating and returns the precise nutrient content.

This is an exciting idea for a modul of a very big project, I'm going to deep google if something like that is done before.

Joel Tomkins said:

Maybe something as simple as an app that reminds you to eat regularly.

You could just hit a button when you eat and it will start a timer for 3 hours (possibly user adjustable depending on their dietary regime, or even if it took into account how many calories you'd just eaten), and notify you at 2.5 hours that you are due to eat again soon, and again at 3 hours and every 15 minutes after 3 hours.

So eat frequency reminder with calorie control. I could go with this. It suppose the user has a strong will not to fuck up his diet and can eyeball his food's calorie content (just notice the analogy with FredInChina's idea:)

However I would argue about eat frequency does matter. It works extremely well (at least for me), but it is more like head fixing not body problem solver advice.

A meal generator based on what you have. So you tell it what you have in the cupboards then it suggests new and interesting ways that you can combine said ingredients to make something delicious and nutritious
To my knowledge there's nothing like this or if there are they always tell you that you need to go out and buy more stuff to complete the recipe, has to work with what you've got 

spinelli said:

A meal generator based on what you have. So you tell it what you have in the cupboards then it suggests new and interesting ways that you can combine said ingredients to make something delicious and nutritious

To my knowledge there's nothing like this or if there are they always tell you that you need to go out and buy more stuff to complete the recipe, has to work with what you've got 

 

It is a variant of "the diet problem" (a classic of linear programming); instead of minimizing the cost function, you'll need to attribute a "pleasure" parameter to your recipe list and attempt to maximize it.

 

You can do this with your excel solver.

Ãdám Ficsór said:

So eat frequency reminder with calorie control. I could go with this. It suppose the user has a strong will not to fuck up his diet and can eyeball his food's calorie content (just notice the analogy with FredInChina's idea:)

However I would argue about eat frequency does matter. It works extremely well (at least for me), but it is more like head fixing not body problem solver advice.

Yeah it would need the user to input a few parameters about the diet he/she was following. For me it would take:

Daily Calorie Goal: 2500

Number of meals: 6

Eating Frequency: 3 Hours

Based on that input it would remind me to eat 417 calories every 3 hours, 5 times (not 6 as you would be starting the timer when you have your first meal). This simple app doesn't take into account how many calories were actually eaten at each meal which is fine for me. Most people if they track their calories or macros already use an app to do that, whether it be Nutritiming or MyFitnessPal. 

The only advanced feature I might add is a different mode where instead of just giving a fixed amount of calories for a fixed number of meals, maybe it took the above data and calculated that the user is eating their 2500 calories over 15 hours which means on average 1 calorie every 21.6 seconds (15 hours/2500=0.006 hours per calorie). The user would then input a total calorie count every time they had a meal or snack and it would add 21.6 seconds to the timer for every calorie consumed. The 100 calorie bar I just had for breakfast would add 36 minutes to the timer (which would notify me when that 36 minutes was up that I needed to eat again - or I'd be in negative energy balance). 

Of course the app makes assumptions that people know what they are doing when it comes to calculating daily energy needs and would work best when eating low GI foods in the right ratios, but that's the beauty of it's simplicity. It only requires a quick estimate of calories, and leaves you to eat whatever ratios of carbs, fats, protein and veges you decide are best for you.

spinelli said:

A meal generator based on what you have. So you tell it what you have in the cupboards then it suggests new and interesting ways that you can combine said ingredients to make something delicious and nutritious

To my knowledge there's nothing like this or if there are they always tell you that you need to go out and buy more stuff to complete the recipe, has to work with what you've got 

http://www.eatthismuch.com/ might be able to do this. Too lazy to have a play around with it now, but I remember you can tell it what foods you want to eat (maybe just say what you have in the house) and I think it also generates recipes. It looks like its improved a lot since I last checked it out. 

I just stick whatever is in the house into a stirfry and deal with the consequences   No recipe needed!

Had a look and this does essentially what I was asking for so unless you can improve it dramatically there's probably not much point, although a lot of the recepies aren't really meals so if you could do the same and it suggest how you can combine these different bits into meals that would be cool. Although I'm sure you'd need a lot of user generated feedback for it to be able to successfully suggest combinations that aren't very weird or unpalatable. but stirfry or curry everything is the way to go 

 http://www.supercook.com/