Beeminder Forum

VeggieMinding

Tech
#1

I’m looking to automate counting my servings of whole plant foods.

This help article https://help.beeminder.com/article/94-example-goal-eat-14-servings-of-vegetables-per-week says “Unfortunately, there’s not yet a magical app that will automatically track and verify your vegetable consumption, so we’ve got to use a manual-entry goal to beemind this.”

But (gotta love technology!) now there IS an app to do precisely this from nutritionfacts.org ‘Dr Greger’s Daily Dozen’ but I want Beeminder to pull it automatically, rather than having to set up a manual goal (not having to log twice). I thought maybe Zapier or IFTTT might be able to pull it, but neither of them list it (maybe because there’s no commercial side to it?). I’m new to Beeminder and those integrations, so trying to set it up myself is a bit over my head.

Anyone know how we could go about automating this, the same way it pulls from apps like Fitbit and Apple Health fetch for steps or sleep, etc? Interested in trying to help work it out?

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#2

Does it send you an email with you summary for the day or anything? If so, you could potentially use Zapier’s email parser to send the data so Beeminder maybe.

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#3

Long shot, but is there a public RSS feed you could leverage?

Otherwise, is there a public profile page that shows your data? If so, you might be able to use Integromat’s Text Parser to scrape the html…

Do they have a public API?

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#4

Their iOS and Android apps are open source, so maybe the API could be reverse-engineered to figure out the requests and auth to use with Integromat or another tool?

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#5

Hi @mary, thanks for checking in. No, the app DOES have customizable in-app reminders, but no emails (or RSS feeds or public profiles), it’s all self-contained within the app.

#6

Maybe use Android Automate or Tasker to hook into its database? Never done it but I think I’ve seen people saying it was possible…

#7

Hi @narthur, thanks for those thoughts, but no they don’t have a public RSS feed or profiles to pull from (or send email summaries that could be used, as @mary suggested). As you said, their code is open sourced (they’re a nonprofit health charity), so someone who knows how might be able to set something up.

It’s all new to me, but given enough time I’d probably be able to figure it out, though it’s outside my current experience. There does seem to be interest from others in the forum in beeminding nutrition, in particular servings of fruits & veggies, so I’m wondering if anyone with more experience is game to try and help set it up in a way that others of us can all use it? (Or have folks gotten settled with manual tracking?)

I currently use the app and keep myself accountable with a StickK commitment that I post a screen cap to the journal weekly, but
a) that’s a lot of extra steps (no automation there either) and (more importantly)
b) Beeminder would have more of a ‘sting,’ if we could get it set up.

I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in Beeminding their nutrition (particularly servings of whole plant foods) to download the free app and give it a try either way :slight_smile:

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#8

Maybe I missed it, are you using Android or iOS?

Database access in Android Automate

Database access in Tasker

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#9

iOS, personally. Though the app is available on both and I’d hope to find a solution that could work for users on either platform

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#10

Ok, then I’m out of ideas for now. Automate and Tasker are only on Android.

1 Like
#11

I skipped the Android link, but checked out Tasker. Looks like it might pull from a database, but as everything with the app is stored on the phone, I’m not sure if it would work.

That said, maybe other Android users will see this discussion and it might help them. Thanks for trying @narthur - appreciate it!

1 Like