Okay, by now we hopefully know I’m a girly, that loves to use AI, to make her life more efficient. I have to tell you about the thing I built this past weekend.
If you’ve been here a while, you know I’m a type A girly with a holistic health obsession and a big love for food. And yet, every single day, without fail, the same question would kind of annoy me: what am I actually going to eat today?
Not because I don’t know how to cook - I’ve got a whole repertoire of dishes I already make and love. The problem was never a lack of options. It was the opposite. Too many options, the protein goals I wanted to hit, whole foods focus, writing a grocery list, meal prepping, oh I also want snacks…
So I did what any self-respecting type A girly with access to Claude would do: I built myself a personal nutritionist and private chef. In an evening. And it now lives in my phone.
Firstly - to make my life easier. My husband and I love food. I love cooking, I love hosting dinners. But between the thousands of recipe videos saved across my apps and roughly 567 notes on my phone (I counted, don’t ask), planning our weekly shop and figuring out what to actually cook had gotten genuinely cluttered.
And it’s not just about the mess - it’s about what actually works for both of us. My focus is hormonal health and feeling strong, not weight loss, which means eating ENOUGH, hitting protein at every meal, not skimping on healthy fats, staying wholefood-focused. It also has to be something my husband genuinely likes, made with the appliances I own, ingredients I can actually get, and - ideally - done in under 30 minutes.
That’s a genuinely personalized way of eating. Not something you can google. Not something a generic meal-plan PDF was ever built for. A real nutritionist could build this for me - for a few hundred euros a month, ongoing.
So I thought: what if I just built the nutritionist myself?
Here’s what makes this different from asking Claude “what should I eat” in a random chat: it actually knows me.
I sat down one evening and gave it a full client intake - the kind of thing a real nutritionist would ask on an intro call. My stats, my activity (weightlifting 2x/week, pilates 2x/week, heels dancing, plus a lot of walking), and my actual goal - build lean muscle, feel strong, support my hormones, not lose weight.
Then it went category by category through what I actually eat - proteins, veg, fruit, dairy, pantry - and I mean specific. Chicken breast yes, chicken thighs no. Bell peppers yes, but I don’t like the green ones. Eggs are fine baked into something, never on their own, because I don’t like the texture. It asked, I answered, it remembered.
Then came my recipes. I listed off dishes I already cook and love, and for the ones I’ve only ever made from a cookbook, I took photos of the pages and sent them over - it read the photos directly and transcribed the recipes itself, swapping out anything I don’t like for an alternative ingredients as it went. I now have a genuinely massive personal cookbook saved (116 recipes and counting), all cross-checked against what I actually like, organized by category so nothing gets lost in the scroll.
And then, the actual magic part: the standing rules. Every recipe comes with macros automatically - calories, protein, carbs, fat - no math, no separate tracking app, it just shows up. Ask for a full week and I get macros per meal AND a running daily total. It also just... gets things a generic AI answer never would. That we only want to cook one real meal a day and want breakfast to be no-cook. That leftovers last exactly one day, not four. That snacks rotate through the week instead of repeating (cause I get bored of them otherwise). That quick “picky bits” aka girl-lunch plates should skew high protein so they don’t accidentally turn into crackers and dips only.
It also helps whenever I need it. I tell it what’s sitting in the fridge - chicken, half a cucumber, some feta - and it builds a meal from that plus whatever pantry basics I’d already have. On demand, it puts together my full weekly meal plan, the grocery list to match, and exact recipes for every meal, mixing in its own ideas alongside the ones I’ve fed it myself. I could even automate the whole thing to run every Sunday evening, so by Monday morning the week is already planned. It’s not a one-time meal plan - it’s an ongoing relationship, kind of like having a chef on call.
(Quick disclaimer since we’re talking health: none of this is medical advice - just something I built for fun and ease. It’s not a replacement for proper medical guidance, so loop in your own doctor for anything health-related.)
Behind the paywall, I’m giving you the actual system - not a summary of it, the real thing. Everything you get:
🪜 The exact prompt I pasted into Claude to build this whole setup in one sitting - copy, paste, done. Zero prompt-engineering skills required (if I can write a good prompt, genuinely anyone can, I’m truly not a tech-y person)
📋 My real custom instructions file, word for word - the standing rules that make macros show up automatically on everything, meal plans default to what I actually eat instead of some theoretical number, and leftovers stop getting sized like I’m meal-prepping for a family of four
🥗 My actual food preferences file as a template for you to use - so instead of staring at a blank page trying to remember what you even like, you just fill in the blanks category by category, the exact way I did it
📸 The cookbook-photo trick, step by step - how I turned actual photos of actual cookbook pages into a searchable, cross-checked recipe library instead of a pile of books I never open
🛒 How the grocery list trick works, so your list comes out already sorted by store section instead of you backtracking through the produce aisle four times
🧠 The one framing shift that makes this actually stick long-term - the difference between asking Claude for “a meal plan” once versus building something that just... knows you, permanently
This is genuinely the whole build - the same one running on my own phone right now. All of it.
And if you actually sit down and do this once? You will NEVER have the “ugh, what am I even going to eat” spiral again. Twenty minutes, and it’s done for good.
Okay. Let’s get into it. 👇
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