How to Create a Meal Plan Using Your Custom Macros With ChatGPT

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to create a customized meal plan with your personal macros, ChatGPT is a resource worth looking into. Need your macros set? We can help. Click HERE for a FREE generic macro template resource. Click HERE to purchase macros customized to your lifestyle and goals (10 of our favorite macro calculated recipes included).

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by Artificial Intelligence that launched in November of 2022. This technology uses statistics, reinforcement learning, and can effectively answer questions, write articles, summarize information, and more. Some say it could become one of the most transformational technologies in business and life. Let’s discover how this could be useful for the macro counter!

Since we’ve started working with clients one on one in 2016, we’ve always we’ve longed for an app that could create a meal plan for customized macros, as turning an arbitrary set of macros into food can be a daunting task, especially when first learning. While we don’t think this will solve all of your macro counting challenges (we’ll go over the pros and cons to meal plans with ChatGPT towards the end of this post), it definitely has some benefits.

ChatGPT is free, but you will need to create a log in and password at the following website chat.openai.com to utilize it. Click HERE to begin. Because of high demand, you may initially receive a message that says “ChatGPT is at capacity right now.” I was able to access it within minutes from my desktop, but there is an option to get notified when “they’re back” if you’re unable to access it right away.

Once logged in, I typed into the chat box, “Can you create a meal plan that contains 135 to 145 grams of protein, 218-228 grams of carbs while eating 70 to 74 grams of fat?”

Within seconds our conversation began. The Chatbot generated meals for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks along with portion sizes of each food, macros for each meal, as well as the total. I input the suggested foods into MyFitnessPal (my prefer macro tracking app) and while the macros weren’t spot on (according to the entries I chose), they were pretty close and could be adjusted pretty easily to get within range.

You can converse back and forth with this chatbot. After receiving my initial meal plan I asked,

“Can you create a meal plan that contains 135 to 145 grams of protein, 218-228 g of carbs while eating 70 to 74 grams of fat that includes a peanut butter cups for dessert?”

Sure enough. It reformulated a few snacks to make 2 peanut butter cups possible for dessert!

I adjusted my last question to see if I could get a version that was dairy free.

“Can you create a meal plan that contains 135 to 145 grams of protein, 218-228 g of carbs while eating 70 to 74 grams of fat and make it dairy free?”

Within seconds it auto generated a new dairy free meal plan.

Chat GPT Pros for the Macro Counter

• Quick and easy
• User friendly
• Can help to get ideas flowing for what to fill your macros with if you’re clueless
• The sky’s the limit on possibilities in terms of substitutions, food restrictions, preferences, and meal specifics as you can chat back and forth with the chatbot.
• Can be individualized for ANY set of macro numbers

Chat GPT Cons Pros for the Macro Counter

• How you formulate your questions matter. For example: if you begin the chat asking the bot to generate a meal plan for your macros (without specifiying ranges), the meal plan may not be close to your macros at all. Thinking of how to formulate the questions to your preferences can take more time than you think.
• Accuracy. The chatbot generates rough estimates based on typical ingredient and brand nutrition information. Depending on your preferred tracking app, the macros/ food choices generated from the chatbot will likely not match up exactly with the food entries in your macro tracking app food database. This can result in your macros not being within range and will likely take additional tweaking on your part.
• There is a high probability that you will not like the foods the chatbot generates. While you can continue chatting with the chatbot to adapt the meal plan to your preferences, this back and forth can be tedious and turn the process from quick and easy to long and lengthy.
• May be a crutch. Getting ideas flowing is one thing, but depending on ChatGPT entirely to generate food for macros regularly might actually be a crutch as it could prevent you from learning the process, finding food that you really enjoy, and making them fit your macros on your own.

Bottom line- while this new technological advancement is exciting, it’s no in-home robot that will meal prep for you. ChatGPT won’t prevent you from emotional eating or self sabatoge. If you’re wanting positive change for your overall health through macro counting, you’ll still have to work hard and we’re here to help you do it!