MacroMeals

Inspiration

As commuter students at NYU, we found it challenging to maintain a healthy diet while on the go. We started paying more attention to our macronutrient intake as we began our fitness journey, but found it difficult to track our progress when eating out. We realized that cooking our own meals was the best way to have control over what we were putting into our bodies. However, we also recognized that many people struggle with counting their calories and macros due to a lack of convenient, healthy options. That's why we decided to participate in this Hackathon and create a website/app that simplifies this process for everyone.

What it does

Our leading product, MacroMeals, is a website designed to simplify the process of tracking meals throughout the day. Users can effortlessly input their sex, height, and weight to receive a customized calorie estimate. MacroMeals also assists indecisive students who struggle with meal selection to remain within their daily calorie budget by providing suggestions to the user. Our platform recommends meals from nearby restaurants that match the user's dietary preferences and proposes recipes based on the ingredients available to them. With MacroMeals, maintaining a healthy diet has never been more straightforward.

How we built it

We built our project using Figma for the main website/front end in order to convey the main chunk of what we wanted our website to do. For our demo we utilized html, css and javascript and used restaurant and nutritional APIs for our information on ingredients. This allowed us to track the calories we intake in the food that we consumed.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to locate suitable APIs for numerous restaurants. Additionally, a significant number of restaurants presently do not provide the nutritional value of their menu items. However, over time, an increasing number of restaurants are beginning to disclose the nutritional information of their food. For our purposes, we utilized the Nutritionix API due to its extensive repository of nutritional data, although it did not encompass all restaurants.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our group's first hackathon, and it proved to be a fascinating yet intimidating experience. As students who have only completed a few CS courses, we lacked any prior coding project experience. The turnout was higher than expected, and while attending Tandon, I anticipated seeing more familiar faces. However, most of the hackers were from diverse locations. Everyone appeared exceptionally intelligent, as evidenced by their screens displaying intricate code. We felt like our project might not measure up to most of these students. While optimistic about our project, we are aware that everyone present is brilliant, and we will discover tomorrow how we stack up.

What we learned

For some of us, this was our initial experience with APIs. During the course of this project, we gained knowledge about how to access APIs and integrate them to acquire information related to popular food items. Additionally, we enhanced our understanding of dieting and the significance of monitoring macronutrient intake, as well as how to estimate a person's caloric requirements.

What's next for MacroMeals

As more and more restaurant incorporate nutrition information on their food and further APIs are available to the public that can access nutrition information of popular restaurants. We can then offer the user more possibilities of food they can have.