Day 3 - Meal Planning Meets AI: Because Who Has Time for Pinterest Dinners?

Use a simple fridge-to-recipe prompt to break out of your cooking rut (and actually eat something besides cheese and crackers).

Day 3: Sunday = Meal Planning (But Make It AI)

I don’t know about you, but in my house only one of the grown-ups is really good about meal planning. Hint: it’s not me.

I’ve had stretches where I dutifully sat down every Sunday to plan a week’s worth of meals. But lately it’s more like open the fridge, cross my fingers, and hope dinner makes itself.

The good news: AI can actually help us out here. It’s great at spinning up meal ideas, organizing shopping lists, and nudging us out of the rut of cooking the same three recipes on repeat.

Since Day 3 falls on a Sunday, it feels like the perfect time to play with meal-planning prompts. But first—let’s answer the big question…

What the Heck Does GPT Mean?

Factoid of the day: GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

Which, honestly, feels like an engineer named it (no offense, engineers). Wouldn’t “Smarty Robot Buddy” or “Recipe Genie” have been clearer?

In plain English:

• Generative = it can create new stuff (like text or ideas).

• Pre-trained = it learned from a giant pile of information already.

• Transformer = the type of model it uses to understand patterns in words.

So when you give GPT a prompt like “here’s my fridge—now what?” it’s basically scanning its giant playbook of food knowledge and remixing it for you.

Quick Refresher: Prompt Structure

A good prompt usually has:

1. Context – what’s the situation?
   “Here’s what’s in my fridge…”

2. Instruction – what do you want AI to do?
   “Make me a 3-day meal plan.”

3. Constraints/Style – how should it be done?
   “Keep it healthy, low fat, and include breakfast, lunch, dinner, plus one snack per day.”

4. Optional Extras – anything special?
   “Make it kid-friendly, or support hormone balance with calcium-rich foods.”

Prompt of the Day

Copy/paste and try this one out:

“Here’s what’s in my fridge [list items]. Can you create a healthy 3-day meal plan using these ingredients? Please include breakfast, lunch, dinner, and one snack per day.”

Super Fun Bonus Activities

• With text only: Try adding a dietary goal (like “help me build muscle” or “make it kid-friendly (I added “make sure meals support hormone balance and include calcium-rich foods to support bone density.”).

• With photos: Snap photo of what’s in your fridge → upload (easiest on mobile app) → prompt. The nice thing? AI won’t judge how packed and disorganized your fridge might be.

Beauty of a Hack for Instacart Users

• Go to Account → Orders in Instacart

• Open your most recent order

• Screenshot it

• Upload it to your AI tool (if your platform allows images)

• Add today’s meal-planning prompt and boom—personalized recipes.

Pro tip: the free versions usually have limits on photo uploads, so try text first if you’re testing things out.

Did AI help you come up with a meal plan this week — or even just for the next couple of days? I’d love to hear what you tried and what worked (or didn’t!). Drop a note in the comments and share your experiments. Thanks for being on this little journey with me — we’re learning together, and I hope you’re having a little fun too.