Make AI your Meal Planning Guru with These 5 Rules

Feeling overwhelmed by meal planning? Same. Between cookbooks you never open, a pantry full of mystery items, and influencers with color-coded fridges, making a weekly menu can feel like a second job—minus the paycheck.

In this episode, I’m showing you how to turn ChatGPT (or your favorite AI) into a meal-planning assistant that actually works for your real life. You’ll learn the 5 rules I use to create nutrient-dense weekly menus without food boredom, wasted groceries, or endless scrolling through Pinterest.

We’ll cover how to:
• Set clear dietary rules and goals (protein, produce, allergies, protocols—your non-negotiables)
• Use your pantry and freezer to avoid buying your 4th jar of cumin
• Layer in medical or nutritional protocols like Wahls or low-FODMAP
• Turn ingredient lists into actual recipes you’ll want to eat
• Generate a smart, organized grocery list that doesn’t send you back to the store for cilantro

If you’re tired of winging it, tired of food boredom, or tired of being the household pantry detective—this episode is your new weekly ritual!

Stay salty, stay curious, and let’s go to health.

Download the Free Step-by-Step Guide Here! https://vibrancenutrition.com/your-free-ai-meal-planning-guide-is-here/

Find Research Citations and Transcript at Blasphemous Nutrition on Substack

Work with Aimee

Photography by: Dai Ross Photography

Podcast Cover Art: Lilly Kate Creative

How to Leave a Review on Apple Podcasts
Via iOS Device
1. Open Apple Podcast App (purple app icon that says Podcasts).
2. Go to the icons at the bottom of the screen and choose “search”
3. Search for “Blasphemous Nutrition”
4. Click on the SHOW, not the episode.
5. Scroll all the way down to “Ratings and Reviews” section
6. Click on “Write a Review” (if you don’t see that option, click on “See All” first)
7. Rate the show on a five-star scale (5 is highest rating) and write a review!
8. Bask in the glow of doing a good deed that makes a difference!

Transcript

0:00

The following episode contains outrageous amounts of feta cheese, phallic adjacent squashes, the 44th president, and ask kissing artificial intelligence. For listeners with Victorian sensibilities, please keep smelling salts at the ready. Hey Rebels. Welcome to Blasphemous Nutrition. Consider this podcast your pantry full of clarity, perspective, and the nuance needed to counter the superficial health advice so freely given on the internet. I am Aimee, the unapologetically candid host of Blasphemous Nutrition and a double degreed nutritionist with 20 years experience. I'm here to share a more nuanced tape. On living and eating well to sustain and recover your health. If you found most health advice to be so generic is to be meaningless or so extreme that it's unrealistic. And you don't mind the occasional F-bomb, you've come to the right place. From dissecting the latest nutrition trends to breaking down published research and sharing my own clinical experiences, I'm on a mission to foster clarity amidst all the confusion and empower you to have the health you need to live a life you love. Now, let's get started. Welcome back to Blasphemous Nutrition. I'm your host Aimee, a double degreed nutritionist who lifts weights solely to carry all my grocery bags up four flights of stairs in one trip. These days chat, GPT now knows more about my spice cupboards than my husband does. It's been a seriously helpful tool in eliminating the extra labor of meal planning for nutrient density without the food boredom. And today I am going to show you my exact process to make AI work for you in this regard. In a culture where we are pressed for time and quick options are highly processed, meal planning becomes an essential tool in the toolkit of anyone trying to consistently improve their diet. For the sake of their health to manage diseases like diabetes or to simply maintain the health that they have. However, it often feels like an extra job that eats up all of your free time without the bonus of a paycheck. Even for those of us who focus on food for a living meal, planning can easily consume hours of our weekend, and that's not including the shopping and actual prep work. I imagine you can totally relate; maybe you have a bookcase full of gorgeous cookbooks that you'd love to work through, but it is way too overwhelming. Perhaps your struggle is in an unorganized kitchen that makes it hard to know what you have on hand and what you need to buy. Kitchen cabinets and pantries are often deep and therefore difficult to utilize efficiently, especially if you are short like I am. This can lead to accidentally owning six bottles of soy sauce and three tubs of half eaten peanut butter. And yeah, I am talking from personal experience. All of this is made even worse when you follow influencers on social media who post pictures of their gorgeous fridges filled with perfect containers of measured portions, stunningly decorated meals, or offer suggestions with an ingredients list that's as long as your arm. They make it look easy. But if you tried this yourself, you know it's anything but. Between recipes you may have saved on Instagram, your ever expanding Pinterest menu idea board, and the collection of downloadable recipe books you've gathered over the years. It quickly becomes overwhelming to figure out what to make each week. Analysis paralysis is very, very real. Enter chat, GP. You can easily use AI as a savvy assistant to organize your pantry, your favorite recipes and your nutrition requirements to lay out meal ideas that get you going and tweak it along the way. As your needs change, your kitchen contents shift or food boredom begins to set in. For my personal nutrition, I've tracked my food intake periodically for long enough and often enough that I know what nutrients I tend to fall short in, based upon my typical eating habits. I usually aim to fill several of these gaps with my snack choices, which are much easier to habitually lock in without creating meal, boredom, and like everyone else in the world, I have weeks where I'm on point. Weeks where I am way off track. If I'm stressed or otherwise burned out. My desire to meal plan and cook goes straight out the window and my nutrition ends up suffering. I also suffer from a very. Severe case of food, boredom. So eating the same style or flavor or type of food more than a couple times a week sets off this rebellious streak in me that rivals any moody teenager you may know. To break outta the latest rut without learning a completely new set of cooking skills. I created a formula to put into chat GBT to help me create meals at home without adding to my spice collection, my overstocked pantry, or eating up hours of my time hunting down new recipes. This is still a work in progress for me, but I'm really liking what I'm seeing thus far. So here are my five rules. To using chat GPT as your meal planning guru, they are as follows. Number one, start with your purpose in mind. Number two, take inventory. Number three, add any protocols and preferences. Number four, go from ingredients to recipes. And number five, finish with a shopping list. So rule number one, you want to design with your purpose in mind. In order for this to work, you have to have a clear intention so that you can train, chat, GPT to do its job correctly. So think about the ultimate goal in your meal planning. Do your nutrition goals include having a set amount of vegetable servings per day? Maybe you have specific protein requirements or dietary limitations. All of these provide guardrails for GPT to create a customized meal plan that will actually work for you. And the more specific your goals, the more chat GPT can be of service. In my situation, I'm looking to create a protein and produce focused meal plan without gluten or soy. Very loosely based off of the walls protocol, but adjusted to include eggs. Beans seeds and nuts. And while I typically prepare breakfast and lunch for myself, my dinner needs to serve for people. And this must be represented in any shopping list I have created. So keep your goals and your nutrition objectives in mind as you proceed to the next step, as these will determine the rules that you give to chat. GPT. Here is an example prompt: create a seven day menu plan using the following dietary rules. Seafood three times a week, five servings of vegetables and two fruits per day. Include two servings of dark green vegetables and one serving of berries per day. Aim for at least 110 grams of protein per day with no more than 10 grams of added sugar in the meal plan. No gluten or sesame. So that is similar to what I threw into chat GBTI was very, very specific. Most people, I suspect, will not be that granular with their meal planning goals. Here are some other prompt ideas that you may want to use for yourself. One, using leftovers on purpose. So here's a prompt that you could use. Make me a five day dinner plan where every recipe creates leftovers that turn into something new the next day. For example, roast chicken to chicken tacos to chicken soup. Focus on protein and produce, exclude onions and garlic. Or if you have limited time, you can have chat GPT. Create a menu plan based on batch cooking. Here is a prompt: plan a week of meals where I batch cook two proteins and use them across five days of dinners. Keep prep minimal and show me how to mix up flavors for variety. If you have an overstuffed freezer of things you've largely forgotten about, you can use chat GPT to help you work through all of those items. Same thing holds for the pantry, right? So here is a prompt that you can use as a freezer clean out challenge. Using my freezer inventory, make me a seven day dinner plan that prioritizes these ingredients First. Keep meals under 30 minutes and high in protein and produce. Create a shopping list only for the extras I need. If you really wanna have home cooked meals, but you're super short on time chat, GPT can be your savior. Here's a prompt for some quick wins. During weeknights, create a five day dinner plan where every meal takes 20 minutes or less, uses one pan or one pot, and has at least 25 grams of protein per serving includes sides that use mostly pantry staples. Additionally you can train, chat, CPT to have recipes that are specifically intended to feed the whole family at dinner, but maybe only include enough for you. At lunch, a prompt in that scenario might look like this. Plan, five days of meals, breakfast for two, lunch for one. Dinner for four lunches should be easy. High protein meals that don't require reheating. Dinners should use some overlapping ingredients for efficiency. If your family is super into theme nights chat, GPT will totally create some fun themed menu plans for you. You can ask it for a seven day dinner plan based upon themes like meatless Monday, taco Tuesday, sheet Pan Thursday, seafood Saturday, leftover Sunday, right? And then if there's any other parameters you want. To include in your menu plan with regards to your specific nutrition needs, and you can enter that in there as well. For those of you who are really, really working on combating the increase of your grocery bill, use chat GPT to create a more budget friendly batch plan. In this scenario, you will wanna let chat GPT know where you live because it will be able to estimate. The grocery prices in your area. For instance, if you live in St. Louis, Missouri, your grocery prices will not cost the same as if you live in London, England, right? So a budget friendly prompt might look like. Plan five days of dinner for four people. Costing no more than 200 pounds per week. Focus on affordable proteins and seasonal produce for October in London, England. Show me how to cook once and eat twice wherever possible. If you are like me and you hoard food and you have an overflowing pantry list and a freezer that is just filled to the brim, prompt chat, GPT, to use ingredients from that inventory first, for instance. Referencing my pantry list, create a five day menu using mostly what I already have, highlight which meals I can make immediately with zero extra shopping. And then because life is in flux and things change, chat, GPT is perfect for any adjustments you can make. Here's a great example for gardeners. Update my five day meal. Plan to include a bumper crop of zucchini and an extra jar of Dijon mustard. Replace or modify existing recipes, so these ingredients get used up first. Keep meals high in protein and produce under 30 minutes in prep length and consistent with my dietary rules. Include recipe ideas or swaps where these ingredients actually make sense. So use this whenever life changes your ingredients, right? You get a new CSA box or that bumper crop of zucchini, or maybe you go to Costco and in a fever state, you just get a little bit too excited and come home with more than you bargain for. Adding these ingredients and having chat GPT help you adapt your plan instead of restarting from scratch will help you keep your fridge from becoming a produce graveyard. Now, some of these above prompts segue into rule number two. Know and use what you already have. And this goes to the inventory. The first thing that I did for this project was to open up my pantry and my spice cupboards, and that is intentionally multiple cupboards. And I took inventory. Do this with your freezer as well, because we both know you've had that bag of frozen peas in there since Obama's first term, and it is time to use'em up. I entered my inventory into chat GPT in no specific order, and I actually did this by taking a picture of a handwritten list I had made and then asking it to list out all of the ingredients that I had written by hand. There were some mistakes that it made because I have very poor penmanship and I wrote small, but going through, I would say it probably got about 85% of the list correctly. You can also type all of your ingredients into the chat box and then ask it to reorganize the list of ingredients. That you've entered by categories. It will then compile them into specific categories such as grains, condiments, oils, canned goods, and so on. But if there are specific categories that you want used, all you have to do is just prompt chat, GPT to use them. Once my inventory list was created, I asked chat GPT to create a downloadable document, listing all of the items in my pantry as well as the spices I had on hand. And then using the new project tab on the sidebar, I created a new project that I labeled menu planning. This is where I create and organize my weekly menus. In this new project labeled menu planning, I uploaded the documents that I had downloaded from the previous chat into this menu planning project. So having those documents uploaded into this set project area allows chat GPT to regularly reference my pantry and the spices that I have on hand when creating menus. So long as I prompt it. To do so, you can also create a document of all of your dietary rules and then upload that to the meal planning project to help ensure nothing is forgotten. This is super, super handy when you are working within rigid specific protocols or macro targets. I then asked chat GPT to create a meal plan that utilized my dietary rules that I had determined in step one, but also took into account what I already had on hand. So you'll open up the chat box in the menu planning project. After you have uploaded the documents into that project, then you can prompt it with something like plan meals with 120 grams of protein and 800 grams of produce per person daily breakfast serves four, lunch serves, one. Dinner serves four. Eliminate gluten or almonds limit sugar to 15 grams a day. These are my dietary rules for all meals. Use my pantry and freezer inventory to facilitate menu planning and build a five day menu that uses up these ingredients first while following my dietary rules. So it'll quickly spit out a menu plan and you will want to do due diligence and go over it to ensure that all the rules are followed. As you're doing this, you may discover that there are some rules that you forgot to add in, or that maybe you need breakfast for five days of the week, but not seven, and you can just tweak it, you know, say something to the effect of, adjust the above menu plan with new Rule X. Okay. That said, the more rules you have, the harder it is for chat GBT to, and you honestly to keep track of everything. Sometimes it'll forget these rules and need reminding, but I have found with uploading the documents into a separate project, that it's doing a really good job of keeping that in mind. It's kind of like super training it or giving it a. Advanced certification before it comes as your assistant, so it already knows some of the things to just reliably do. If you feel it's forgotten some rules and it needs reminding, you can go back and ask it to check its work. It will often make the adjustments on its own. You may also discover that in that menu plan it's included a food you don't like or maybe a food you cannot access where you live, and just then follow up with a prompt to replace that item while continuing to adhere to the set list of dietary rules that were given. As you know, any adjustments that you make may change the nutrient density of that meal plan or the Mac. Rows, right? So you really wanna reinforce, you know, keep these rules top of mind. Make this substitution. Now, once the baseline foods in the menu plan are looking good and you've ensured all of the rules are followed, you can then take those menu items and use chat GPT to suggest recipe ideas. And this is rule number four, going from ingredients to recipes. Now usually chat, GPT will spit out an ingredients based meal such as salmon with broccoli and quinoa, right? If it has not automatically done this, ask it to do so. And then you will prompt chat GPT to convert the ingredients in the menu plan into actual recipes using your pantry items, as well as dietary rules. For instance, because my prompt is pretty specific with regards to the amount of protein and produce I want chat. GPT spit out specific ingredients and the amounts, right? So for example, dinner was 150 grams of pork loin, a hundred grams of roasted broccoli, a hundred grams of roasted carrots, and 80 grams of baked zucchini. That's my ingredient list from there. I want to create actual recipes that I can use to not just feed myself, but feed the entire family. So then I generated a prompt that said, create dinner recipes. Using these ingredients, using these dinner ingredients, as well as items in my pantry and spice cabinet inventory And it generated several different recipes, like a mediterranean spiced pork with halmi and garlicy roasted vegetables. A Moroccan pork with pumpkin broccoli. And Garlicy Greens, Asian style pork with miso broccoli, and sesame pumpkin. As I've been playing with this, sometimes it'll spit out recipes that sound super weird to me, or recommend spice combinations from my spice cabinet that I'm like, there's no way in hell. I'm gonna mix all of that together, but by and large, it does keep the recipes relatively simple with minimal ingredients and very clear instructions on how to cook the recipe that it has suggested. All of the recipes that it has suggested that sounded good to me, which honestly was most of them. That I ended up making turned out just fine, about as good as any other random recipe you might find on the internet, but this was specially curated using ingredients I had on hand and aligning with how I actually want to eat. So it becomes much more effective for me to use chat GPT to create my meal plan and provide those recipes. You can also swap one recipe for another without wrecking the whole week using this framework. It's really quite easy to do once you kind of see how things are laid out. Now when I am asking chat GPT to make recipe ideas with the menu given, I often will do this in a new chat within that meal planning project, so that way my pantry and food rule theme with ingredients alone for those menu plans stays uncluttered. You may find as you. Start making recipes that ingredients or suggestions feel a little imbalanced. Like for instance, once it suggested that I have three ounces of feta per person on a salad, or I was like, no, no, that's not how I'm gonna get my calcium today. Or it may suggest way more cabbage for dinner than is reasonable for a person to eat in any given sitting. You can also prompt it to begin with recipes that make use of ingredients that you have in excess of if like me, you tend to collect too much of something because you didn't realize you already had it. Now, once you have your menu plan laid out and the recipes look decent, ask chat GPT for a consolidated grocery list. Once that menu is set. This is how that prompt can look: based on this five day meal plan. Create a shopping list sorted by category, produce proteins, pantry, dairy, frozen foods, combine repeated ingredients and note the exact amounts. You can customize this further by asking for quantities by meal or for the week. If you shop multiple days a week, for instance, on Saturdays as well as Wednesdays have it break up the list into two days. Based upon your shopping days, you'll likely need to prompt it to list your menus by weekday rather than numerically, which it's inclined to do. And then once you create that shopping list, you can also ask it to mark pantry items that you already have. So you don't buy another damn jar of cumin. This is really great for organizing your shopping trips because the only thing that is worse than meal planning is realizing you've got to go back to the store for cilantro when you're in the middle of making dinner. I did all of this using the. Free version of chat, GPT. That said, the more documents you create, the more you may have to wait to complete the task that you're trying to do. Always avoid having chat. GPT create images as this often blocks you from continuing onward for several hours. When you're using the free version as part of the algorithm of addiction chat, GBT will always ask you if you want something else. Avoid saying yes. To its suggestions, unless it's actually a really good idea and feels essential to do so. If you're not sure, ask for clarification first. If you're not really sure what the value of a suggestion it's making will offer you. All of this will help keep the thread streamlined and uncluttered with useless things. Now rather than expecting AI to be perfect from the first try, do your best and tweak the instructions as you go along. Think of chat, GPT or whatever your preferred AI is as the brand new intern, or a child who needs to be taught a complicated task from scratch. While this may seem labor intensive, its ability to point us in a really good direction. From the get go is solid. It just needs some fine tuning as you go along. Overall it saves loads of time over going through cookbooks or Pinterest boards. AI is familiar with popular dietary protocols and books, so if you're following something like the Walls Protocol or a low FODMAP Diet Chat, GPT can handle this without. Any problems at all, and that's the real genius here, is using AI as a strategic partner to help you make achieving your goals easier. It isn't replacing your brain or disregarding your taste buds, it's just cutting down the friction between your good intentions and a dinner at the table that you can be proud of. You teach it your patterns. What's in your pantry and your goals, and in return, it gives you structure without perimenopausal tears. So go ahead and play with it. Start small. Maybe ask it for suggestions based on what's currently in your refrigerator, or have it spit out a full week of just breakfast ideas. That can be prepared in less than 10 minutes. See how far you can get utilizing chat GPT to help you with your meal planning before things go awry, because things will always go awry in time. And if there is something that can be amended to make it easier, such as being really busy and having less time to make dinners than you thought. Go in, make adjustments to get back on track if the overall benefit of utilizing AI in this way remains favorable to you. To make implementation of all of this easier, I've created a document with the five rules as well as suggested prompts to implement those rules. Check out the link in the show notes to download the document and give it a shot. If you do give this a try. I totally wanna hear how it goes. Drop me a comment, send me a message, or tag me on social media at Vibrance Nutrition with your AI assisted creations, the victories, the flops, everything in between. In today's World health is maintained by eating intentionally while keeping your sanity intact in the process. And I wanna know how it's going for you. Stay salty, stay curious, and I'll see you next time. If you have found some nuggets of wisdom, make sure to subscribe, rate and share blasphemous nutrition with those you care about as you navigate the labyrinth of health advice out there. Remember, health is a journey, not a dietary dictatorship. Stay skeptical, stay daring, and challenge the norms that no longer serve you. If you've got burning questions or wanna share your own flavor of rebellion, slide into my dms. Your stories fuel me, and I love hearing them. Thanks again for tuning into Blasphemous Nutrition. Until next time, this is Aimee signing off, reminding you that truth is nuanced and any dish can be made better with a little bit of sass.