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Finding healthy recipes that actually fit your busy lifestyle can feel like a full-time job. Between juggling work, family, and everything else, the last thing you want is to spend hours scrolling through endless recipe sites — only to end up stuck in the same dinner rut or reaching for quick but unhealthy options.

But what if there was an easy, free way to get personalized meal plans designed just for you — hitting your protein goals, respecting your dietary needs, and fitting smoothly into your schedule? Enter AI…

In this post, I’ll introduce you to how AI can become your personal nutrition assistant, helping you find recipes tailored to your life with smart ingredient swaps, customized protein targets, and organized grocery lists. Even if you’ve never used AI before, you’ll soon see how it can make healthy eating simpler, more flexible, and a lot less overwhelming!

What Is AI and Why Should You Care?

AI (artificial intelligence) has improved tremendously over the past few years. While it used to give generic, unhelpful responses, today's AI can provide surprisingly useful and personalized suggestions — if you know how to ask the right questions.

Think of popular AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude as incredibly knowledgeable assistants who can help with everything from meal planning to grocery lists. The best part? Most of these tools are free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Important disclaimer: AI isn't meant to replace medical professionals, registered dietitians, or therapists. It's a tool to help inspire and organize your meal planning, but always consult healthcare providers for specific medical or nutritional advice.

AI Is Only as Good as Your Input

Here's the thing most people get wrong: they ask AI vague questions like "give me five recipes with 30 grams of protein" and wonder why the results are disappointing. Without context, you'll get recipes that might require 15 ingredients you don't have, cooking methods you can't use, or foods you don't even like.

The key is being specific about:

• Your dietary restrictions and preferences
• Ingredients you have on hand
• Cooking time and methods available
• Storage and reheating needs
• Nutritional goals

Details Matter

The biggest mistake people make with AI is asking vague questions and expecting personalized results. AI needs context to be useful. Think of it like giving directions to someone who's never been to your house before. The more specific details you provide about your dietary needs, available ingredients, and cooking constraints, the more tailored and practical your results will be.

Here's the difference between a generic request and one that gets results:

Generic prompt: "Give me five recipes with 30 grams of protein."

Detailed prompt: "Give me five vegetarian dinner recipes with at least 30 grams of protein and five grams of fiber using mostly whole foods. Right now I have in the house cottage cheese, tofu, and eggs — make sure to include those. Also give me an idea for one protein that I don't have in the house that would be a really high protein source for me to try a new recipe. Don't have any of these recipes have more than five ingredients. Make sure that they are able to keep in the fridge for a few days or are easily warmed up in the microwave. I am not gluten-free and I do eat eggs and dairy. Don't include any recipes that have black pepper in them."

See the difference? The second version gives AI everything it needs to create truly useful suggestions.

Pro Tips for Better AI Responses

1. Get Even More Specific

Ask AI: "What other descriptors could I put in here that would get me an even better, more customized recommendation?" It will suggest additional details you might not have considered.

2. Request Macro Breakdowns

Ask for calorie counts, fat grams, and other nutritional information for each recipe. This helps you verify the information and plan your daily intake.

3. Create Shopping Lists

AI can organize your grocery needs by store section (dairy, frozen, produce) or even create Instacart-ready shopping lists.

4. Build Meal Plans

Try prompts like:

• "Create a seven-day high protein meal plan under 1600 calories per day. Include the grocery list."
• "I need quick 15-minute meal ideas that are diabetic-friendly and require no oven."
• "Give me recipe ideas that require no chopping and no oven use."

How AI Sparked a New Favorite Recipe

Here's a real example from my own AI experiment. I asked for high-protein, low-carb dinner ideas and got this suggestion:

Ricotta Bowl: Half a cup of ricotta, two scrambled eggs, one tablespoon hemp seeds, one tablespoon olive oil, half a cup of spinach. Sauté the spinach, scramble the eggs, mix everything in a bowl.

Nutrition: 30 grams protein, 6.2 grams carbs, 39 grams fat.

It hadn't occurred to me to combine ricotta with eggs this way, but it makes perfect sense — it's essentially the filling from lasagna without the noodles! Sometimes AI helps you rediscover combinations you've forgotten or never considered.

Remember: Use Your Brain Too

While AI can provide fantastic inspiration, always remember:

• Verify nutritional information — AI can sometimes get numbers wrong
• Double-check ingredients and measurements using apps like MyFitnessPal if needed
• Use results as inspiration rather than absolute truth
• Adapt suggestions to fit your actual preferences and needs

Getting Started Today

Ready to try it? Here are some beginner-friendly prompts to get you started:

1. For meal planning: "Create three easy dinner ideas with at least 25 grams of protein that use [ingredients you have] and take less than 30 minutes to prepare."
2. For nutrition analysis: "Look at this food log [paste your day's meals] and suggest one area I could improve for better nutrition."
3. For variety: "I love [specific recipe you enjoy] because [reasons]. Give me three similar recipes that might appeal to me."

AI won't replace your need to think critically about nutrition, but it can absolutely streamline the overwhelming process of meal planning. Instead of spending hours searching for recipes that may or may not work for your life, you can get personalized suggestions in minutes.

The key is learning to communicate effectively with AI by being specific about your needs, preferences, and constraints. Once you master this skill, you'll wonder how you ever meal-planned without it.

What's your biggest meal planning challenge? Try asking AI about it with a detailed prompt and see what solutions it suggests. You might be surprised by the creative ideas it comes up with — ideas that actually work for your real life, not some idealized version of it.

Remember, the goal isn't perfection; it's progress. And AI can help you make that progress a lot more achievable and a lot less stressful.

TRANSCRIPT:

Disclaimer: The transcript below is provided for your convenience and may contain typos, errors, or grammatical inconsistencies, as it has not been professionally edited or proofread. Please enjoy it as-is and read at your own discretion.

Please note: The content shared in this podcast and blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical guidance. 

 Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. How is everybody feeling today? It's another Monday. You've made it to another week. Hopefully, if you're listening to this right when it airs, you are having a good start to the week. I have to tell you the fact that I can walk outside every day and I mean, I did like my track.

Okay, and I'll be back to the track. They don't have air conditioning though in the high school track that I walk in. So it served its purpose over the winter and into the spring, but I cannot do hot and humid with no air. Walking around a track, and I just love walking outside. Now, I tend to think when I'm walking outside that I'm sort of like.

The, what is it? Like the mad professor, like on these walks all the time, but I always thought, oh, no one else is doing a walk. 'cause I walk really early in the morning and then one of these days I did a later walk and I realized, no, everyone's walking. They're just not walking that early. So some of you might be surprised that everyone's not up at five, six o'clock.

So anyway, I hope you're having an amazing summer and heading into. Later in the year, I mean, gosh, time really flies, right. Today I wanna talk about something that we've actually never spoken about on the podcast, and I just think it's time, which is a little bit about how AI can be helpful in your health journey.

So some of you, but might be more or less into using AI based on. Frankly, based on what your requirements are at Job, your age, different things like that. I find some people were really early adopters and we're using it all the time. And then also, let's be real here. AI has improved tremendously in the past one to three years and frankly, AI has improved so much that I think that nowadays it's actually quite useful. While as before it was just generic junk and wasn't really helpful.

So I'm gonna talk a little bit about. One area that I think is helpful. I actually, in my 30 30 program, I am diving a lot more into this. I have sort of one whole session that I do on it. I have six different areas that I think are really helpful, but I'm gonna talk about just one today. 'cause I don't wanna overwhelm all of you on here.

And I think this will be helpful enough that majority of you can take this and use it. And I've talked about parts of this on different episodes, so I think that we need to leverage technology to help us and not hurt us. Okay, so what do I mean by that? We have a lot of self-monitoring devices nowadays, whether it be the Apple Watch or aura ring, different things like that, and this technology can be super helpful in some cases, and super harmful in others.

What do I mean by that? Sometimes you use these things and you realize, wow, I'm really not getting great sleep. Or it, makes you see something that you didn't know, right? Oh my gosh, I'm really not active at all. I thought I was walking all the time. I'll tell when people come into my clinic, they'll say, oh, I'm, I'm walking all the time.

And I say, okay, what's the baseline step count? They'll go do that. We'll meet a week later. They're getting a thousand steps. So sometimes people's perception is very different than what reality is. And so these devices can help give some perspective on that. Now, sometimes it's not helpful if this gets you down, like you feel like you're very, maybe you're someone that is more impulsively drawn to numbers and.

You can't let it go at night if you don't reach a certain step count. And so you realize like it's really, it's becoming a task master. It's really running my life and it's not helpful anymore. So for me, for example, I'm not crazy about getting to 10 K steps, majority of the days I get there. But in zero way, am I bothered if some days on the weekends, for example, maybe I only get to six or seven, I don't care.

I don't even care if it's at three or two and I'm not someone if I'm sick that it's like, ah, I need to make myself do that. Absolutely not. I, I'm just not run by it. But most days it's a helpful metric for me. I'll give you an example. I actually have the little widget with the step count. It's on my Mac desktop as well as on my watch, and so I can look at my watch and see where my step count is, and I know sort of by lunchtime what benchmark I need to have reached typically for it to get done by the end of the day.

That's helpful 'cause it helps me pace out the movement. It tells me, ah, you really haven't gotten as much as you thought. Take some time at lunch to walk a little bit. So it helps keep me on track. Okay, now let's talk about other technologies. Ai. So this is something that is becoming powerful with helping with a lot of different areas. One area that I see be so incredibly helpful is recipe support based on certain macronutrient goals. Now, before I talk about that, I just wanna give a quick disclaimer here. Okay, so ai, it's not gonna diagnose things. It's not meant to be a registered dietician, right?

It's not meant to. Be a therapist for you. It's not meant to be all those things. It's meant as a tool, but it doesn't replace you seeing a medical person and actually getting insight on all these things. So these are tools. They're not meant to replace actual medical help. Right. And there are lots of different AI tools out there.

I personally use Chat GBT, but there's Claude. There's just so many others out there. So. Whatever AI that you have. The biggest thing with AI is that AI is only as good as what you put into it. So you can't put a super generic prompt like, give me five recipes with 30 grams of protein.

Okay, but you didn't put anything else in there. So you end up getting these recipes that are maybe super involved, right? Like they have many more ingredients that you would ever want, or they don't include ingredients that you typically have in the house, and it's not helpful at all. So how could you help make AI be a little bit more helpful to you?

So you need to have prompts that you put in there. I'm gonna give you some examples here, and then I will tell you how I would add even more detail so that what you get out is even more helpful for you. Okay, so here's one example. Give me five vegetarian dinner recipes with at least 30 grams of protein and five grams of fiber using mostly whole foods.

That could be a prompt that could stand on its own and you could pop it in. Now what I would put in here that could make it honestly a hundred times better. Let me read this again. Give me five vegetarian dinner recipes. With at least 30 grams of protein and five grams of fiber using mostly whole based foods.

Right now I have in the house cottage cheese, tofu eggs. Make sure to include those. Also give me an idea for one protein that I don't have in the house. That would actually be a really high. Protein source for me to think about so I can try a new recipe. Don't have any of these recipes. Have more than five ingredients.

Make sure that they are able to keep in the fridge for a few days or are easily warmed up in the microwave after. Do you see how you start to get really specific? I even put in there for me, for example, don't include any recipes that have pepper in it. I don't, I don't enjoy pla. Black pepper. We just, as a family, we didn't grow up using it.

I, I detest it. So you put as much as you can in there. And another thing, for example, with vegetarian is actually not enough of a descriptor. So most of the time AI will kick back. Can you tell me more? Are you a lacto ovo vegetarian? Meaning, you know, do you eat eggs and cheese and stuff like that? Are there any dietary restrictions?

So you should throw in there as well. I am not gluten free. I do eat eggs and dairy. Right? And if it has a question, it'll ask you that before giving you ideas. But then it will pop out a bunch of ideas and you can look, is this helpful or not? Alright? If you love what's there, great. You go with it. They can usually put it into a PDF for you, so you can reference it at the store.

They could put it into a shoppable list for you. So that's very common where I will tell it, Hey, make a grocery store shopping list for me and break it down by section of the store. For example, dairy, frozen food, you know, stuff like that. So they'll break it down, and then that way when I'm going around the store, you can do it.

You can also ask it to make a Instacart shopping list for you. So it can do these kind of things, right? So a lot of the time you don't even know these things are possible because you haven't been playing around with it. And sometimes it will suggest these things to you and sometimes it won't. So another.

Thing besides a tip being that encouraging you to be really specific, right? Like protein goals, do you have allergies, cook time, right? The more detail, the better. The tip I wanna give you is say, Hey, what other descriptors could I put in here that would get me an even better, more customized recommendation?

And they'll give you. What they think would help make it better. Ask it to help you out. You're, of course, you're not gonna know how to do all this if you're, if you haven't been doing it routinely. The other thing is you can ask it for a macro breakdown for each recipe.

So this is really helpful if you, you know, we just said 30 grams of protein, five fiber, but. What if you also wanna know the calorie number on it. You also wanna know the grams of fat. You can ask it to do all of that for you. All right, next example that I wanna give here. You can say, create a seven day high protein meal plan under 1600 calories per day. Include the grocery list. Again, you give all your examples. Another one you could say is, I need quick 15 minute meal ideas that are diabetic friendly and require no oven.

Do you see how you can make it really. Really specific, you could even put in there, I want recipe ideas that do not require me to chop anything, that do not require me to use the oven. So basically you're asking for fresh prepared ideas, right? So I hope that this episode today gives you some ideas for.

What you could put into AI and see if it can help you. I think that you really need to play around with it. I'll tell you what I think is super fun. You could even, for example, you could take a nutrition log and say, Hey, this is what I've been doing. Here are my stats, dah, dah, dah, dah, da, uh, find a blind spot for me.

Give me some encouragement about this. And again, you, this isn't where it's medical what's coming back at you, but you're just seeing what is it, thinking that I'm not, that I'm not catching. Right. That's the whole part of AI is that it's crowdsourcing all of this. It's looking around. It's kind of collectively coming with stuff.

Alright, now. This can be super fun. Here is the little moment where we have to, we're still a person, so when you get the stuff back, then you need to look through it and you need to decide. Then first of all, AI can lie, so they might be saying that these recipes are whatever macronutrient count, you might need to check it.

I think it should more give you inspiration and ideas and an area to search on. So I wanna give you an example. I actually did this for myself actually. I did it within the group. And let me go down here. I'm actually looking at my presentation as I do this that I did within the 30 30 group. And I'm pointing this as a bonus call in the September round and after.

'cause I think that this is really one, even for future rounds to come, that's important to go through. So one of the recipes that it turned out here. It was a dinner idea. It was a ricotta bowl, so it was half a cup of ricotta, two scrambled eggs, one tablespoon hemp seed, one tablespoon olive oil, half a cup of spinach, and the prep was saute it scramble the eggs, mix everything in a bowl, and it was 30 grams of protein, 6.2 grams of carb, 39 grams of fat, and.

Guys, it hadn't occurred to me to do this ricotta with eggs, of course. It's amazing. That's basically the base of, if any of you like lasagnas, right? That's what's in the middle of it. There's noodles, red sauce, cheese and stuff like this. And I just sat there and I thought, of course, but you know what's, and then also there was like a stir fry idea.

There was so many good ideas on here, right? And listen, I've made all these things at different times. I don't remember them. You know, like you kind of go in and outta things. So you could even put on there as a prompt In the past, I really liked this recipe and I like that recipe, and here's why I like this or that, give me similar things or things that you think based on this would be AP applicable to me.

So again, the more you put in, the more helpful it is. But whatever you get out, let it be ideas. Double check it with a fact check, right? Do you need to stick it into my FitnessPal to figure out, is this actually what I think it is? You know, the ingredients might vary. All of that. But you still, you still need to use your brain, but you've got ideas and inspiration.

Alright, I hope that this episode's helpful. Gives you something to think about, something to go play with. Let me know if there are any ways that you find, gosh, this has really been the game changer when it comes to my health and using this. I just find that there are so many applications for this and I think that it can lead to.

I think that it can help people to get in a better direction and why would we not wanna use that? So hopefully you can use this in a way that helps you. If you ever have any questions, make sure that you can always write beneath this episode. There's a little fan mail tab. Remember, if you submit something to us, it's anonymous unless you put your name and an email for us to get back to you.

Otherwise, you can submit questions or reflections, things like that. And I wanna leave you with, if you are loving this podcast, and let's say you're actually getting ideas and you're able to go. Implement things and, and all of that, and maybe you're coming back weekly. Can you please leave us a review, hopefully a five star review.

Can you leave us a review? Wherever you are listening to us, this is incredibly helpful to get the podcast bigger reach so that other people can learn in this way as well. Otherwise, it's really hard to get your podcast to other people, so share it with a friend, leave us a review. I would greatly appreciate that.

This is such a labor of love when I. Get on here and make these episodes, and I'm really always hoping that you're able to learn something that moves your health forward. Alright, I hope you have an amazing rest of the week.