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, Get your personalised plan is the first card. If you already have one, open the ⋯ menu in the top corner and choose Create a new plan.

The questions

1. Meals per 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. Tap a card: its border, title and check mark highlight your choice.
2. Eating style Everything, Vegetarian or Vegan. This is a hard rule: dishes that do not fit never make it into your plan. Each option says what it leaves out, and your choice is marked by the border, the title and the check mark.
3. Foods to avoid Pick any of the common allergens - gluten, dairy, eggs, nuts and so on. Dishes containing them are excluded from your plan, whether it is an allergy or simply something you avoid. The options are a list: each row carries a photo, the name and what it covers, and you can select as many as you need. Leave every row unselected to apply no allergen exclusions. The list only shows exclusions our recipes can actually act on, so it is deliberately short; seafood - crustaceans and molluscs together - is a single row.
4. What matters more to you? Two photo cards, each with its picture on the right: Plan bigger portions, shown with stacked meal containers, or A different dish every meal, shown with a salad bowl. Each card carries a description and two benefits; its border, title and check confirm your selection. Larger portions let a dish that keeps well appear today and tomorrow; the other option aims for as much variety as the available recipes allow. Batch cooking remains 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 eating style and the foods you avoid are shared with the recipe lists in the app: they filter by the same answers, and if you change them in a list's Filters, the generator starts from the new ones.

Your daily goal is shown, not asked

The last step 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 last step sums up your answers

Step five puts everything in one place: your daily goal - calories, protein, carbs and fat - and under it the four answers you gave, so you can check them before anything is built. Build my week then builds the week and saves it in one go; there is no separate screen to approve. Nothing in it is final - every meal can still be swapped, resized, moved or removed afterwards.

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. A recipe of your own made only of catalog foods can be cooked once and eaten twice as well; one with an ingredient we cannot look up is always cooked fresh.

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.

Your own recipes are in the running

The generator does not only pick from the hi.fitness catalog. Recipes you have created yourself - in the app's recipe editor or straight from a recipe picker - compete for every meal on exactly the same terms as the catalog's: how well they fit that meal's share of your day, and how recently the week has served them. Nothing pushes your own dish ahead of the catalog, and nothing holds it back. The private copy the app makes when you edit a shared recipe inside a plan does not count as one of your recipes here - it belongs to that meal.

Three things to know:

• Give a recipe a meal type. The generator offers a dish for the meals it is tagged with - breakfast, lunch, dinner and so on - and a recipe with no meal type goes to the back of the line. The app asks for at least one when you save, and a recipe of yours that has none anyway asks for one on its own page.
• A recipe counts as one serving. Enter the ingredients for the whole pot and set Servings in the editor: the generator plans one serving of the dish, and fits that serving to the meal like any other.
• With a diet or allergens set, every ingredient has to be checkable. An ingredient typed in with its own values, rather than matched to a food in our catalog, cannot be checked against your diet or allergens, so such a recipe is left out of the plan while those rules are on. The same goes for an ingredient matched to a product from a barcode scan or to a food you created yourself - only catalog foods count as checkable. Match the ingredient to a catalog food and it is back in.

To write a recipe of your own, open More → Nutrition plan, tap + Add meal on a day and then the create button (a square with a pencil) in the top corner of the recipe list. You can also tap Add your own recipe at the end of the list when you swap a planned meal in your food diary, or in the ⋯ menu in the top corner of Nutrition plan. Saved from a day of the plan, the dish goes on that day as well; saved from the ⋯ menu, it only joins your recipes. It then appears under Mine in every meal picker, and the generator may use it in the next week it builds. A recipe your coach shared with you is in the same lists, without the Mine label, and you cannot edit or delete it.

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

If you simply want a different week from the same answers, open the ⋯ menu on More → Nutrition plan and choose Suggest other meals: we keep your answers, build a different week and replace the current one. It is offered only when this device remembers the answers your last plan was built with.

The plan is yours the moment you start it. Open More → Nutrition plan to swap meals, fit a day's portions to your goal, add or remove anything, exactly like a plan you built by hand. Liquids such as milk, juice and oil are listed in millilitres. You can also swap a single planned meal for something else straight from the Planned tab on the day.