How I turned my broken diet into an AI meal planner app for real life

For years I have been stuck in the same loop

1. Get motivated to eat healthier
2. Save a ton of recipes from Instagram and TikTok
3. Spend hours planning and shopping
4. Burn out in a week and go back to random food and delivery

The problem was not knowledge.
The problem was answering the same three questions every day

What do I cook today
How do I keep it sustainable
What do I buy for the week

I tried a lot of things
• ChatGPT prompts for recipes
• classic calorie tracking apps
• other meal planners

None of them really worked for my real life
• ChatGPT does not remember my context and does not sync with a grocery list
• most apps feel generic and give me an endless feed of recipes to scroll
• I hate around ten ingredients since childhood, my wife hates another set, and apps rarely adapt to that

So I decided to build the tool I wanted myself

PlanEat AI is an iOS app that
• builds a weekly meal plan based on your goals, dislikes, available time and basic cooking equipment
• generates simple step by step recipes with normal products from a regular grocery store
• creates a grouped grocery list that stays in sync with the plan
• lets you quickly swap meals and update the list without starting from scratch

Under the hood it uses an LLM based planner plus some logic to keep plans realistic
number of ingredients, time to cook, prep on weekends and reuse on busy days.

This week I got my first paid yearly subscriber
59 dollars from a stranger who decided the app was worth committing for a year. It feels a bit surreal to see someone pay for a very personal problem I turned into a product.

Right now I am still trying to figure out
• how strict the app should be about nutrition vs how forgiving it should be for real life
• how much control to give the user without turning it into another planning chore
• how to explain the value in a few seconds without going into nutrition theory

On Sunday November 16 I am launching PlanEat AI on Product Hunt to get more feedback from non technical users.
I will share the link here on Sunday in the comments if anyone wants to follow the launch and see how it goes.

In the meantime I would love to hear from you
• how do you handle your own food planning, if you do it at all
• what would make a tool like this a no brainer for you
• what is the main reason you usually fail to keep a better diet long term

Happy to answer any questions about the product, the tech behind it, or the process of building it solo.