Using AI to Make Meal Prep a Breeze
Hello you Meal Prepping Maven,
Lets talk about using AI to simplify the age old question: What's for dinner?
The practice of batch cooking your meals ahead of time, commonly referred to as meal prep, is a great way to facilitate better nutritional practices and save a ton of time. In the Holistic Transformation Program we use this technique as a bedrock habit upon which we build more complex and nuanced nutritional strategies.
But meal prep takes work. You have to figure out what to cook, what to shop for, find recipes and cooking techniques that fit your macro targets and ingredient restrictions. It can be a lot.
Enter your new meal prep assistant, AI. We’ll share with you at the end the exact script you can copy and paste into ChatGPT to get meal prep ideas, but first let's talk through how we got there.
Getting Started
We start with the basics, what do we want ChatGPT to build for us? I’d like some meal ideas including ingredients lists, cooking instructions, and a shopping list:
Make a plan for meal prep that will cover 4 meals a day for 4 days including ingredients lists, cooking instructions and a shopping list.
Next, let's be specific about what ingredients we want to use. In the Holistic Transformation Program we eliminate a LOT of inflammatory ingredients like wheat, dairy, and alcohol. Instead of naming every single item on the list, we find it easier to just say Paleo friendly ingredients, minus eggs to keep things compliant for those in the initial stages of the program:
Use paleo diet ingredients and exclude eggs
Macros
While we’re at it, we want to be specific about some macronutrient restrictions. We want high protein, relatively low carbohydrate meals. While you can also add some specificity around dietary fat intake if you’re in the middle of a cut, we decided to leave that open to interpretation at this point.
To get your protein target per meal, take your body weight and divide by four to get your protein grams per meal. For example, a 160 lb person would want roughly 40g of protein per meal. Also, we find most people thrive on roughly 100g of carbs per day unless they’re actively changing their body composition.
Each meal must contain at least 40g of protein, and less than 25g of carbs.
Lastly, let's just reinforce that we want our meals made from meat and plants, either fruit or vegetables. While it’s certainly possible to be healthy and incorporate other food groups, almost everyone will thrive on this combination of nutrient dense, gut safe food.
Meals should be constructed primarily from meat, vegetables, and fruits.
Put it all together, and we get an output like the excerpt you see below:
Meal 1: Breakfast - Turkey Sausage Patties with Sautéed Spinach
- **Ingredients**: 8 oz ground turkey, 1 cup spinach, 1 tbsp olive oil, garlic powder, salt, pepper
- **Instructions**:
1. Form ground turkey into patties, season with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.
2. Heat olive oil in a pan over medium heat.
3. Cook patties until browned and fully cooked.
4. Remove patties and add spinach to the pan, sauté until wilted.
5. Serve patties with sautéed spinach.
Meal 2: Lunch - Grilled Chicken Breast with Avocado Salad
- **Ingredients**: 8 oz chicken breast, 1/2 avocado, 1 cup mixed greens, 1/2 cucumber, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp
lemon juice, salt, pepper
- **Instructions**:
1. Season chicken breast with salt and pepper.
2. Grill or pan-fry chicken until fully cooked, then slice.
3. Toss mixed greens, sliced avocado, and cucumber in a bowl.
4. Top with sliced chicken.
5. Drizzle with olive oil and lemon juice.
Meal 3: Dinner - Baked Salmon with Asparagus
- **Ingredients**: 8 oz salmon filet, 1 cup asparagus, 1 tbsp olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper
- **Instructions**:
1. Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C).
2. Toss asparagus in olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and spread on a baking sheet.
3. Place salmon filet on the same sheet, season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
4. Bake for 20-25 minutes until asparagus is tender and salmon is cooked through.
Now we have four days worth of meal ideas to choose from that I know have clean ingredients and hit my macronutrient targets. To change this into batch meal prep all I have to do is increase the quantities in each recipe as well as the shopping list. I find using a 4-6x factor works nicely to get some mileage out of your efforts in the kitchen.
You can also modify the script to exclude anything that doesn’t fit your preferences, like seafood, or brussels sprouts. Or ask for specifics like having fruit at breakfasts.
While AI certainly isn’t perfect yet, and admittedly still needs some double checking, we still find a TON of value in using it to do the grunt work of figuring out what’s for dinner.
We hope you’ll give it a shot and let us know what your experience is like!
The ChatGPT Script:
Make a plan for meal prep that will cover 4 meals a day for 4 days including cooking instructions and a shopping list.
Use paleo diet ingredients and exclude eggs, each meal must contain at least 40g of protein, and less than 25g of carbs.
Meals should be constructed primarily from meat, vegetables, and fruits.