Tech-Driven Nutrition: Using ChatGPT to Optimize My Diet as a Nutrition Scientist
Using AI to track meals, fight cravings, and build flexible diet plans that actually work.
Even as a nutrition scientist, I need some help to stay on track with my health goals. Everyone has that little voice inside their head that drives them to eat sugary, high calorie, high fat, hyperpalatable foods. It’s simply a fact of evolution. This little voice has helped us survive for thousands of years. It drives us to seek food, so that we can survive when times of scarcity come. There is a reason why certain tribes in africa have learned to communicate with honeybirds, that guide them to collect honey. Foods like honey are a sugar and calorie bomb, crucial for our survival. But in today’s age, we are surrounded by food and we need some help to shut down that little survival voice. The times of scarcity are far away.
A quick look in the app store shows a multitude of apps available to track calorie intake, to manage cravings and to find healthy recipes. But now there’s an even easier way to track your diet, hell you can even get a personal nutrition coach along with it! It’s the AI revolution that seems to be taking over and replacing just about everything, ChatGPT.
At first I didn’t really really get the hype behind it, and it took me some time to jump on board the ChatGPT train. But I’m starting to find more and more uses for it. Slowly its starting to integrate my life, where it probably will stay for the foreseeable future.
My most recent discovery has been to use ChatGPT to track my diet. And it has exceeded my expectations in doing so!
At first I asked it to create a personal diet plan for me, I had some goals, like losing x amount of weight in a couple of weeks, I follow a pescetarian diet and I want to reach a certain fiber target every day.
Now the sample diet plan i got from it was fine, but I knew I probably wasn’t going to follow that. What was much more valuable was this.
I started uploading photo’s of my meals in ChatGPT. Starting off with my breakfast and lunch. Based on the diet plan it previously made for me, I asked it to give me a nutritional breakdown of my diet. The nutritional breakdown seemed pretty accurate in my professional opinion! It tend to estimate calories a bit lower than they really are, because you can’t see from the meals how much fat is used in cooking and the portions will not be accurate to the gram. But overall it gives you some good insights.
Next ChatGPT suggested a dinner for me, based on what i already ate that day and my personal diet plan. That particular night, I was craving something Indian and I needed to use some vegetables that I already had in my fridge. This input went into ChatGPT and within seconds I got a recipe that was resourceful, fit my taste and my diet. It truly took out all the difficulty of going grocery shopping.
Normally after a long day, when I’m a little hungry, it becomes a challenge to think of a dinner that checks all the boxes. And I know I’m not the only one, it’s basic human physiology and psychology.
Everyone can eat well in the morning, when they’re still full of willpower. But willpower slowly depletes during the day, making it harder and harder to make choices that are in line with your goals. Now we can simply put our wishes, goals and cravings into the AI model and it comes up with a solution!
On this particular day I made the dinner recipe it gave me, and I loved it. But what I loved even more was this; I took a picture of my dinner, uploaded it to ChatGPT and asked it to rate my diet that day. As I followed the plan to a T, I got near perfect scores that day! I hit my calorie target, my fibre target, I ate pretty much all whole foods and got plenty of health-promoting antioxidants and spices in.
Now I know realistically not every day is going to be a perfect day nutrition wise, that’s not realistic. But we often can plan for it. So I knew in the upcoming two weeks, I had some events coming up where I just want to enjoy myself. I told ChatGPT this and it took this into account in my diet plan, it built in an additional deficit on other days, so I would be free to enjoy myself, go out for dinner and have some wine on those days.
Because of this daily tracking, which is so easy because you can just add photos of your meals, it’s easy to stay accountable and you get so much insight on what you’re choosing to feed your body. The questions you can ask are endless, which is just the biggest advantage of using ChatGPT over other nutrition apps. If you want to know which essential nutrients could be missing from your diet, or what you should improve to lose weight for example, you can ask all of that and the advice gets better the longer you use it.
The future of food apps will definitely be based on AI. Apps will soon be incorporating AI with user-friendly interfaces so all this will become even easier for the average user, and you won’t even need to think about which questions to ask. The apps will guide you through it. But for now, we can already use ChatGPT to get great insights on our diet!