Generating a meal plan

There are two ways in, and both take under a minute.

• From your food diary: open the Calories tab, switch to Planned and tap Generate your meal plan. This card only appears while you have no plan - if a coach plans your meals, or you already have one, it is not there.
• From your plan: open More → Nutrition plan. With no plan yet, Generate your meal plan is the first card. If you already have one, it is in the ⋯ menu in the top corner.

The questions

1. How many meals a day? Three, four or five. Each option lists the day it produces, in your language, so you can see exactly which meals you are choosing - five adds a second small meal to your day, like an afternoon snack.
2. How do you eat? I eat everything, Vegetarian or Vegan. This is a hard rule: dishes that do not fit never make it into your plan.
3. Anything we should leave out? Pick any of the common allergens - gluten, milk, eggs, nuts and so on. Dishes containing them are excluded from your plan, whether it is an allergy or simply something you avoid.
4. Cook once, eat twice? If you opt in, a dish that keeps well can appear today and tomorrow - one pot, two meals, and a shorter shopping list. Off by default.

Your answers are remembered on this device from the last plan you started, so next time the questions arrive pre-filled.

Your daily goal is shown, not asked

The last screen before the preview shows the goal your week will be built to: calories, protein, carbs and fat. It is there so you know what the plan is aiming at - you cannot change it here on purpose, because your daily goal is the same number your food diary compares against every day. To change it, go to More → Nutrition plan and edit your goal there.

If you have never set a goal, we work one out from your profile and say so. Saving the plan then makes that your goal, so your diary and your plan agree.

If we cannot work it out yet - usually because your intake survey is unfinished - the screen says which answers are missing and takes you there. It takes about a minute, and when you come back the step unblocks itself.

The preview is the plan

The last screen shows the whole week, day by day: every meal, what it is, and roughly what each day adds up to against your goal. Nothing is saved until you tap the tick in the top corner, and what you approve is exactly what you get.

How the week is put together

Each meal of the day gets a share of your daily calories - a bigger share for the main meal, a smaller one for a mid-morning meal - and we pick the dish that fits that share best, adjusting the portion in quarter servings so the day lands on your goal.

We also try not to repeat: with enough dishes to choose from, no day serves the same thing twice and the week spreads across the library. When your choices leave us a short list, dishes will repeat rather than the plan coming up empty.

If you opted into batch cooking, a dish that keeps well may appear on two days in a row, in the same meal and at the same portion - never twice in one day, and never three days from one pot.

The plan also tries not to waste what you open: when a dish starts a perishable ingredient, the next days lean toward dishes that finish it - most of all when it is close to its use-by. And when you generate a new week, we look at the plan you are replacing: you get different dishes where we can offer them, and ingredients opened at the end of the old week get used up at the start of the new one.

About diets and allergens

Your diet and the things you leave out are checked against the ingredients of every dish in our catalog, and a dish that does not fit is excluded - this is a hard rule, not a suggestion. It goes by our catalog's ingredient data, though, so keep reading the labels of anything you buy or cook, especially with a serious allergy.

Starting a plan replaces the one you follow now

You follow one meal plan at a time. Starting a generated plan moves your current one to your archive. Your food diary is never touched - everything you have already logged stays exactly as it is.

Changing it afterwards

The plan is yours the moment you start it. Open More → Nutrition plan to swap meals, change portions, add or remove anything, exactly like a plan you built by hand. You can also swap a single planned meal for something else straight from the Planned tab on the day.