If you live in a busy household and are also in charge of cooking the meals for your family on a daily basis, then you know how much work it is! Getting food on the table in time, all the time, can cause stress and anxiety, especially if you also have to deal with picky or ungrateful eaters.
Taking the stress out of family meals should be a top priority, and with the help of AI chatbot ChatGPT, it is now possible! You can absolutely use ChatGPT to help you plan your meals for the week, and get some great recipe ideas. In this article, I’ll share how easy it can be when using ChatGPT to create a family meal plan.
Using ChatGPT To Create A Family Meal Plan
Sitting down together for a family meal is a tradition that has fizzled out over the years as more and more people have eaten out away from the home due to everyone having busy schedules full of activities.
It’s something we try our best to hold onto in our household, and we keep it as sacred as possible — no technology, either!
But prepping and planning meals can be a big task.
On top of this, if you are feeling bogged down by having the same foods over and over again, then this repetition can make mealtimes feel uninspired, and that can find you reaching for your phone to order pizza instead.
But there are many benefits to enjoying a family meal together! Perhaps most important is the fact that the food will be healthier, so children will be less likely to develop eating disorders and behavioral problems that will cause stress on relationships.
There are many benefits to enjoying a family meal together! Perhaps most important is the fact that the food will be healthier, so children will be less likely to develop eating disorders and behavioral problems that will cause stress on relationships.
Just like you have to plan and schedule everyone’s activities like school and sports practice, planning ahead with your meal preparation will not only make your life easier by reducing stress, but may also help encourage your children to also get involved. Food planning and prep can be a way to further develop your relationship with them.
Other benefits of family meal planning include:
1. Healthy Eating
By planning your meals ahead of time, you have the opportunity to prioritize healthier options as well as manage and control portion sizes and calorie intake. It also takes away the impulse of ordering unhealthy junk food from takeouts, and you can easily accommodate special dietary needs, such as vegan or gluten-free diets.
2. Saving Time
You will eliminate the stress of decision-making about what you need to prepare for each meal, which will save some space in your mind, as well as the time it takes to come up with your decision.
3. Staying Within Budget
Avoiding food waste is something that most families would like help with, and by planning your meals ahead of time, you will only end up buying the ingredients you need, and reduce the extra spending that comes with eating out and buying for convenience.
4. Bringing Variety To The Table
You can improve your family’s diet by introducing new foods and trying new recipes, which provides an opportunity to make sitting around the table an even more enjoyable experience.
AI Meal Planning Is the Answer!
And planning family meals ahead of time has now been made even easier with the help of AI. You may have heard about ChatGPT, the natural language learning AI tech that has taken the world by storm.
But are you aware that it does so much more than have human-like conversations or write essays for students that are looking for a way to cheat the system?
With this in mind, I asked ChatGPT to create a healthy meal plan for a family of four on a budget for an entire week, taking inspiration from popular Netflix shows, Cook At All Costs and The Big Family Cooking Showdown.
So, instead of feeling overwhelmed or stressed about what to make for each meal or having to spend too much time in the kitchen, let’s look at how ChatGPT can help you make your family life much easier and healthier as a result.
Recipe Planning With AI
To start, we gave the AI chatbot a really simple prompt, just asking it to produce a healthy meal plan for a family on a budget:
And this is what we received:
The AI chatbot was even so considerate to give us daily snack options:
Although we can’t argue that this family meal plan is quite healthy and will satisfy an appetite, we can’t agree that avocados, mixed berries, salmon, asparagus, almond butter, and nutritional yeast are considered budget ingredients.
So, we continued our AI conversation and asked ChatGPT to give us a vegan option to the previous family meal plan, again on a budget:
This vegan family meal plan was definitely more on the money, although we couldn’t help but notice that it was extremely similar to the meat option and dairy option.
In fact, the snacks were basically the same, except for the greek yogurt being switched for a vegan option, and again adding nutritional yeast and almond butter, which would be considered luxuries for a family on a budget:
But of course, this was just a general meal plan, and you have the power to continue the conversation with ChatGPT to go even further to do things like cater to specific diets and needs.
With this in mind, for the next meal plan that we wanted ChatGPT to produce, we asked for meals that didn’t include vegetables, because we had a family of picky eaters:
And then we asked for a more detailed recipe for day four’s dinner option of Beef Stir Fry with Rice and Soy Sauce:
We wouldn’t suggest eating this way for too long though, because veggies are, of course, very good for you. So, then we decided to challenge the AI chatbot to provide us with a beef recipe for picky eaters that hid the vegetables, which is something that many parents have to deal with at one time or another:
With this query though, the AI chatbot took about 15 minutes to reply to us in this instance — in most situations, you will usually you get a response within about 30 seconds, but only as long as the server isn’t overloading, which can happen every so often.
However, after the wait, this is the ‘non-vegetable’ beef recipe that ChatGPT eventually provided us with, and we have to say that we think it did a good job of it:
Final Thoughts
ChatGPT has the ability to make anyone’s life a whole lot easier, especially for moms and dads who are in charge of preparing and cooking food for their hungry children, depending on how you use it.
Chat with it, ask it to go in further depth or tweak this or that, so that you can really zoom in on the right answer for your family. This is where the power of ChatGPT lies.
But that’s why using ChatGPT to create a family meal plan can help you. And if you do, then you can really enjoy talking, laughing, and sharing good times around the dinner table with your family instead of stressing about your next meal, just like the generations that came before you.
