Day 3 of Claude Code:

As a vegetarian weightlifter, it can be a lot of effort to ensure I’m getting enough protein from the Purdue Dining Courts while also keeping my calorie count low. Using Claude, I made a Chrome extension that redesigns the Purdue Menu website to give me all the information I want with a convenient tracker. To do this, it:

• filters out any options containing meat or eggs

• locates the items with the highest protein-to-calorie ratio and puts them at the top of the page

• tells me the optimal dining court to go to for the day based on this ratio

• lets me easily track my calorie and protein count for the day (including protein from milk and protein shakes) using the real nutritional information from Purdue’s website

This helped me learn about some dietary mistakes I was making:

• I was consuming wayyy too many calories

  • I previously treated calories from fruits like apple sauce, mandarin oranges, and blueberries like a rounding error. As it turns out, 6 servings of mandarin oranges is a lot of calories (600)!

  • My previous dietary strategy for supplementation, 4 scoops of pea protein and 8 cups of milk, was giving me many more calories than I realized and less protein than I realized. I would have guessed 160 grams of protein and 1100 calories, but it’s actually 116 grams of protein and 1440 calories

    • Part of this mistake happened because I didn’t read my protein nutrition label correctly until recently.

• I get a lot of protein from small sources that I had never bothered to track before.

• Cheese and tofu consistently have some of the highest protein-to-calorie ratios. In fact, I had to remove cheese slices, Parmesan cheese, 3-cheese blend, and nacho cheese from the “Highest Protein Efficiency” list, as they consistently took up several of the top spots. (I kept cottage cheese at the top as a reminder, though).

If anyone reading this is a Purdue student and would like me to send them this Chrome extension, feel free to DM me!