A couple of months ago I was in a consultation with a client and we had been talking about how helpful it is to plan your meals weekly so you don’t have improvise. Changing your diet is hard because a lot of what we eat and when is habituated, meaning you don’t really have to think about it, you make your meals on automatic pilot. If you don’t have a system to follow to implement your diet changes, you’ll keep falling back on old habits.

Anyway, my client told me that she had started to plan her meals using an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. I thought that was so clever! I have a small set of meals that I recycle and I get bored of them, but I’m not good with creating meals from scratch (I hate cooking ☹) so I any help to take the thinking about what to eat out of the planning works for me!

So I thought I’d try it for myself and share with you what the results were so you can decide if this an approach you want to use to plan your meals.

Now I used Chat GPT, but there are various artificial intelligence tools out there so pick the one you like best.

Using an AI tool is a bit similar to doing a Google search in the sense that you type in a question and the tool provides answers. But what is so great about an AI tool is that you can keep refining the results by asking more questions.

Let me demonstrate what I did.

My first question was: “Can you please give me a seven-day meal plan that is gluten and dairy free?”

For day 1 the suggestions were:

• Breakfast: scrambled eggs with sautéed spinach and cherry tomatoes.
• Lunch: grilled chicken salad with mixed greens, cucumbers, carrots, and balsamic vinaigrette.
• Dinner: baked salmon with roasted asparagus and quinoa.
• Snack: fresh fruit salad.

Now if you are vegetarian or vegan or follow any other type of diet, I suggest you put that in your first question. I like to have at least 4 meat-free days in my weekly meal plan, so I then asked: “Can you make this meal plan with 4 no-meat days please?”

This is where it went a little pear-shaped, because it now gave me a completely meat-free meal plan.

I now wanted to see what would happen if I left out a specific food – mushroom in this case, because my daughter is intolerant to mushrooms. The question I asked was: “Can you please update this to make it mushroom-free?”

Strangely enough, the portobello mushroom burgers were still in the meal plan! But when I asked to replace the portobello mushroom burger it suggested a mixed vegetable burger.

My last question was for recipes for the meals in the meal plan and it gave me some links.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the results though. I now have some simple new recipes to try out and the ‘conversation’ I had with the AI tool stays in my account, so I can always come back to it and either further refine my request or just look at the results.

So, if like me, you know that it would be really helpful to plan your meals but you’re a bit stuck or bored with the meals you always make, try an AI tool to give you some new suggestions and plan your week for you.

If you’d like to learn more about how to adjust your diet to help reduce your Endometriosis symptoms, download my free report: “5 Things your eat and drink that make your Endometriosis symptoms worse”.