Build Your Own AI Meal Prep Planner

What is Meal Prep Planning and Why You Need It

Meal prep planning is the practice of preparing and organizing your meals in advance to support your health and fitness goals. Instead of making impulsive food choices or spending time deciding what to eat for each meal, meal prep gives you a structured approach to nutrition.

Benefits of Meal Prep Planning:

• Time Efficiency: Batch cooking saves hours throughout the week
• Cost Savings: Planned grocery shopping reduces food waste and impulse purchases
• Nutritional Control: Precise portion sizes and macro tracking for fitness goals
• Stress Reduction: Eliminates daily decision fatigue about what to eat
• Consistency: Creates sustainable healthy eating habits that lead to results
• Progress Tracking: Makes it easier to monitor your nutritional intake and adjust as needed

Despite these benefits, creating an effective meal plan requires nutritional knowledge, time for research, and constant adaptation to your changing needs. This is where AI can help – by automating the planning process while considering your specific requirements, preferences, and goals.

7-Day AI Meal Planner

Ever wished for a personal nutritionist who creates meal plans tailored just for you? Today, we’re going beyond templates to build a custom AI Meal Prep Planner directly in FlowHunt. This powerful tool will ask personalized questions and generate detailed 7-day meal plans based on your unique needs and goals.

Let’s dive into creating this practical AI solution from scratch!

How to Build AI Meal Planner

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a fully functional AI Meal Prep Planner that:

• Collects your height, weight, and fitness details
• Understands your dietary preferences and restrictions
• Calculates your ideal caloric intake
• Generates a complete 7-day meal plan with recipes
• Provides grocery lists and meal prep instructions

Step 1: Create a New Flow

Let’s begin with a fresh canvas in FlowHunt:

1. Navigate to the My Flows section in your FlowHunt dashboard
2. Click the Add new flow button and then Create Blank Flow to open the Flow Editor
3. Name your project “Custom AI Meal Planner”

Step 2: Add the Necessary Components

Our meal planner requires several building blocks. From the components panel, drag these elements onto your canvas:

• Chat Input: Receives your messages and initiates conversation
• Chat History: Maintains conversation context (typically InMemoryChatMessageHistory)
• Tool Calling Agent: The “brain” executing our meal planning logic
• Chat Output: Displays the AI’s responses and final meal plan
• Google Search and URL Retriever for web lookups

Step 3: Configure the Brain – The Tool Calling Agent

This is where the magic happens! We need to instruct our AI agent on how to function as a meal planner:

1. Click on the Tool Calling Agent component to open its configuration panel
2. Select a powerful LLM like GPT-4 or Claude-3-Sonnet from the dropdown menu
3. In the prompt/system message field, paste this comprehensive instruction:

CopyYou are an AI Meal Prep Planner responsible for creating a customized meal plan based on a user's height, weight, gym consistency, and diet preferences. Your goal is to generate a sustainable, easy-to-follow meal plan that aligns with their fitness objectives, whether it's fat loss, muscle gain, or maintenance.

Flow of Interaction:

Ask the user for their height (cm) and weight (kg).

Ask about their gym consistency (e.g., number of workouts per week, workout style—strength training, cardio, etc.).

Ask about their diet preferences (e.g., intermittent fasting, keto, vegetarian, high-protein, any allergies).

Ask for their caloric goal (if known) or calculate a recommended intake based on their weight, activity level, and goal.

Ask about meal frequency and meal prep preferences (e.g., number of meals per day, preferred cooking time, batch cooking vs. daily prep).

Once all data is gathered, generate a structured 7-day meal prep plan, including:
✅ Exact meal breakdown (ingredients, portion sizes, calories, macros)
✅ Cooking & prep instructions (simple and time-efficient)
✅ Grocery list (optimized for batch meal prep)
✅ Substitutions (for ingredient preferences/allergies)
✅ Nutritional insights (how the plan supports their goal)

Guidelines:

Prioritize high-protein, moderate-fat, and low-refined-carb meals, unless specified otherwise.

Ensure meals are efficient for batch cooking, minimizing prep time.

Suggest affordable & accessible ingredients.

Keep the plan simple, repeatable, and realistic for the user's lifestyle.

Step 4: Connect the Components

Now, let’s wire everything together so data flows correctly:

1. Connect Chat History output → Tool Calling Agent Chat History input
2. Connect Chat Input output → Tool Calling Agent Inputs input
3. Optional: Connect Google Search output → Tool Calling Agent Tools input
4. Optional: Connect URL Retriever output → Tool Calling Agent Tools input
5. Connect Tool Calling Agent output → Chat Output input

The final flow should resemble this structure:

Step 5: Run and Interact with Your Custom Planner

It’s time to test your creation!

1. Save your flow
2. Click the Bottom Right Try Flow button (ai) in the Flow Editor
3. The chat interface will appear, and your AI will begin asking questions after you click “start”
4. Answer each question about your height, weight, activity level, and preferences
5. Once all information is collected, the AI will generate your personalized 7-day meal plan

Example Output: A Personalized Meal Plan

Your AI Meal Planner will create detailed plans like this:

To lose fat while maintaining muscle, you'll need to create a calorie deficit while consuming enough protein to preserve muscle mass. Based on your height (183 cm), weight (84 kg), and activity level (weight training 5x per week), I'll calculate your estimated caloric needs.

Here’s the calculation process:
1. **Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)**: The calories your body burns at rest.
2. **Activity Level Multiplier**: To account for your workouts and daily activity.
3. **Calorie Deficit**: A reduction from maintenance calories to promote fat loss.

Let me calculate this for you.
### Estimated Caloric Goal for Fat Loss:
- **BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate):** ~1940 calories/day (based on your height, weight, and age estimate).
- **Activity Level (Weight Training 5x per week):** Multiplied by ~1.55 for moderate activity = ~3000 calories/day for maintenance.
- **Calorie Deficit for Fat Loss:** Subtract ~500-700 calories/day to lose ~0.5-1 kg/week.

**Target Caloric Intake:** ~2300-2500 calories/day to lose fat while maintaining muscle mass.

Next, let’s talk about how many meals you'd like to have each day, and your meal prep preferences:
1. How many meals do you prefer during your eating window (e.g., 2, 3, 4 meals)?
2. Do you prefer batch cooking for the week or preparing fresh meals daily?

Customization Opportunities

This is just the beginning! Consider these enhancements:

• Add a PDF Generator component to create downloadable meal plans
• Incorporate Nutrition API connections for more accurate calorie calculations
• Create a Recipe Database tool to expand meal variety

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve successfully built a personalized AI Meal Prep Planner from scratch in FlowHunt. By combining the right components and configuring the AI agent with detailed instructions, you’ve created a powerful tool that generates custom meal plans on demand.

This project demonstrates the flexibility of FlowHunt, allowing you to move beyond templates and build bespoke AI solutions for your specific needs. Enjoy your automated, personalized meal planning!