5 ChatGPT Prompts to Help You Live a Healthier Lifestyle
In an age when smart technology touches every corner of our lives, it's no surprise that artificial intelligence is now playing a role in helping us stay healthy. Whether you're struggling with persistent fatigue, trying to manage high blood pressure, or simply looking to gain or lose a few pounds, ChatGPT can be a helpful brainstorming tool—generating suggestions that you can take to your doctor or other licensed professionals.
But let's be very clear: ChatGPT should never be used to make actual health decisions. It is not a medical device, it is not trained to diagnose or treat, and it is not a replacement for your physician, dietitian, or licensed therapist. Instead, use it to gather information, clarify goals, and generate ideas you can review and personalize with your healthcare provider. With that purpose in mind, here are five useful prompts that can support a healthier lifestyle when paired with expert guidance. We wrote this article with research assistance and insights from AI.
ChatGPT Prompts to Help You Improve Your Health
Why It Works: Healthy eating is essential to managing many health conditions. Whether you're trying to gain weight, lower your cholesterol, or balance blood sugar, a smart meal plan can provide structure. ChatGPT can suggest meal ideas based on your goals and preferences—so you can bring those ideas to your doctor or dietitian for review.
Use Case Example:
'Create a 7-day meal plan for someone with high glucose levels. The meals should be low in added sugars, high in fiber, and include vegetarian options.'
Important: You should never follow a ChatGPT-generated meal plan without getting it reviewed by a qualified nutritionist or physician—especially if you have health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, or food allergies.
Health Issues Potentially Addressed (With Professional Supervision):
Why It Works: Regular movement can improve energy, mood, and overall health. If you're looking for a starting point, ChatGPT can create sample workouts tailored to your fitness level and goals—but again, this should only be a way to start a conversation with your doctor or physical therapist, especially if you've been sedentary, injured, or have chronic conditions.
Use Case Example:
'Create a 4-week home workout plan for a beginner who wants to improve energy and lose 10 pounds. No equipment.'
You can also ask for modifications, time limits, or mobility-friendly routines.
Health Issues This May Support (Under Guidance):
Why It Works: Chronic stress can impact everything from sleep to blood pressure to immune function. ChatGPT can suggest mindfulness exercises, breathing techniques, or journaling prompts—but you should never rely on AI to treat anxiety, depression, or other mental health conditions. Consult a licensed mental health professional for diagnosis or treatment.
Use Case Example:
'Create a morning and evening mindfulness routine for someone with a stressful job and poor sleep.'
ChatGPT might recommend guided breathing, screen-free wind-down routines, or gratitude journaling.
Potential Areas of Support (With Supervision):
Why It Works: Diet and lifestyle can play a big role in managing high blood pressure. With this prompt, ChatGPT can generate a list of food suggestions and lifestyle habits that may help—but this is strictly general information.
Use Case Example:
'Give me a list of 10 foods and 5 habits that can help naturally reduce high blood pressure.'
ChatGPT may suggest potassium-rich foods, sodium reduction, exercise, hydration, or sleep improvements—but again, keep in mind these are only ideas and never a replacement for professional medical advice.
Common Conditions That Could Benefit (Always Under Care):
Why It Works: Habit tracking improves consistency. ChatGPT can generate checklists or logs to help you track things like water intake, sleep, mood, or steps—but even this should be shared with your doctor or specialist if it relates to ongoing treatment (e.g., blood sugar, blood pressure, fatigue symptoms).
Use case example:
'Create a printable weekly health tracker that includes water intake, exercise, sleep hours, and mood rating.'
Customizable trackers can keep you motivated—but always include your care team in the loop, especially when dealing with chronic conditions or if something feels off.
Examples of Use:
Final Thoughts: AI Can Inspire You to Get Healthier
ChatGPT can be a powerful partner for generating ideas to support your wellness journey—but it must be used responsibly. It is not a doctor, not a therapist, and not a substitute for licensed medical care. Any plan, idea, or suggestion created by AI should be reviewed and approved by your healthcare team before you act on it.
Use ChatGPT to help you explore new routines, organize your health goals, or clarify questions you want to ask your doctor. It's a brainstorming tool, not a treatment tool. When used this way, it can make your next doctor's visit more productive—and your health journey more personalized.
Your body is unique. What works for others may not work for you. The safest, most effective way to improve your health is to partner with licensed professionals—and use tools like ChatGPT to help you organize, question, and plan more effectively.
Related Articles:
FAQs on Using ChatGPT to Improve Health
No. ChatGPT is not a medical authority and should not be used to make health decisions. It can only generate general suggestions or ideas that should be discussed and approved by licensed healthcare professionals.
Not without medical clearance. Every body is different. What ChatGPT generates is not personalized to your medical history, medications, or risk factors. Always review any plan with your doctor, dietitian, or trainer before trying it.
Only in a supportive, informational way. You might use ChatGPT to come up with questions for your doctor or to help you better understand lifestyle changes—but management of chronic conditions must be directed by your healthcare provider.
About the Authors
Dominique A. Harroch is the Chief of Staff at AllBusiness.com. She has been the Chief of Staff or Operations Leader for multiple companies where she leveraged her extensive experience in operations management, strategic planning, and team leadership to drive organizational success. With a background that spans over two decades in operations leadership, event planning at her own start-up and marketing at various financial and retail companies. Dominique is known for her ability to optimize processes, manage complex projects and lead high-performing teams. She holds a BA in English and Psychology from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from the University of San Francisco. She can be reached via LinkedIn.
Richard D. Harroch is a Senior Advisor to CEOs, management teams, and Boards of Directors. He is an expert on M&A, venture capital, startups, and business contracts. He was the Managing Director and Global Head of M&A at VantagePoint Capital Partners, a venture capital fund in the San Francisco area. His focus is on internet, digital media, AI and technology companies. He was the founder of several Internet companies. His articles have appeared online in Forbes, Fortune, TIME, MSN, Yahoo, Fox Business and AllBusiness.com. Richard is the author of several books on startups and entrepreneurship as well as the co-author of Poker for Dummies and a Wall Street Journal-bestselling book on small business. He is the co-author of a 1,500-page book published by Bloomberg on mergers and acquisitions of privately held companies. He was also a corporate and M&A partner at the international law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. He has been involved in over 200 M&A transactions and 250 startup financings. He can be reached through LinkedIn.
Copyright © by Richard D. Harroch. All rights reserved.
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Allow me a brief moment to bring everyone up to speed on the topic. Suppose you want to tell AI to act a certain way. You want the AI to do this across all subsequent conversations. This usually only applies to your instance. I'll explain in a moment how to do so across instances and allow other people to tap into your use of custom instructions. I might want my AI to always give me its responses in a poetic manner. You see, perhaps I relish poems. I go to the specified location of my AI that allows the entering of a custom instruction and tell it to always respond poetically. After saving this, I will then find that any conversation will always be answered with poetic replies by the AI. In this case, my custom instruction was short and sweet. I merely told the AI to compose answers poetically. If I had something more complex in mind, I could devise a quite lengthy custom instruction. The custom instruction could go on and on, telling the AI to write poetically when it is daytime, but not at nighttime, and to make sure the poems are lighthearted and enjoyable. I might further indicate that I want poems that are rhyming and must somehow encompass references to cats and dogs. And so on. I'm being a bit facetious and just giving you a semblance that a custom instruction can be detailed and provide a boatload of instructions. Custom Instructions Mixed Bag The beauty of custom instructions is that they serve as an overarching form of guidance to the generative AI. They are considered to have a global scope for your instance. All conversations that you have will be subject to whatever the custom instruction says should take place. With such power comes some downsides. Imagine that I am using the AI and have a serious question that should not be framed in a poem. Lo and behold, I ask the solemn question and get a poetic answer. The AI is following what the custom instruction indicated. Period, end of story. The good news is that you can tell the AI that you want it to disregard the custom instructions. When I enter a question, I could mention in the prompt that the AI is not to abide by the custom instructions. Voila, the AI will provide a straightforward answer. Afterward, the custom instructions will continue to apply. The malleability is usually extensive. For example, I might tell the AI that for the next three prompts, do not abide by the custom instructions. Or I could tell the AI that the custom instructions are never to be obeyed unless I say in a prompt that they should be obeyed. I think you can see that this is a generally malleable aspect. Goofed Up Custom Instructions The most disconcerting downside of custom instructions is that you might inadvertently say something in the instructions that is to your detriment. Maybe you won't even realize what you've done. Consider my poetic-demanding custom instruction. I could include a line that insists that no matter what any of my prompts say, never allow me to override the custom instruction. Perhaps I thought that was a smart move. The problem will be that later, I might forget that I had included that line. When I try to turn off the custom instruction via a prompt, the AI might refuse. Usually, the AI will inform you of such a conflict, but there's no guarantee that it will. Worse still is a potential misinterpretation of something in your custom instructions. I might have said that the AI should never mention ugly animals in any of its responses. What in the world is an ugly animal? The sky is the limit. Unfortunately, the AI will potentially opt not to mention all kinds of animals that were not what I had in my mind. Would I realize what is happening? Possibly not. The AI responses would perchance mention some animals and not mention others. It might not be obvious which animals aren't being described. My custom instruction is haunting me because the AI interprets what I said, though the interpretation differs from what I meant. AI Mental Health Advice Shifting gears, let's aim to use custom instructions for the betterment of humanity, rather than the act of simply producing poetic responses. The ChatGPT Study Mode pushes the AI to perform Socratic dialogues with the user and gives guidance rather than spitting out answers. The custom instructions get this to occur. Likewise, the AI attempts to assess the level of proficiency of the user and adjusts to their skill level. Personalized feedback is given. The AI tracks your progress. It's nifty. All due to custom instructions. What other context might custom instructions tackle? I'll focus on the context of mental health. Here's the deal. We get together a bunch of psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, mental health professionals, and the like. They work fervently on composing a set of custom instructions telling the AI how to perform therapy. This includes diagnosing mental health conditions. It includes generating personal recommendations on aiding your mental health. We could turn the generic generative AI that saunters around in the mental health context and turn it into something more bona fide and admirable. Boom, drop the mic. The World Is Never Easy If you are excited about the prospects of these kinds of focused custom instructions, such as for therapy, I am going to ask you to sit down and pour yourself a glass of fine wine. The reason I say this is that there have indeed been such efforts in the mental health realm. And, by and large, the result is not as standout as you might have hoped for. First, the topic of mental health is immense and involves risks to people when inappropriate therapy is employed. Trying to devise a set of custom instructions that can fully and sufficiently provide bona fide therapy is not only unlikely but also inevitably misleading. I say this because some have tried this route and made outlandish claims of what the AI can do as a result of the loaded custom instructions. Watch out for unfulfilled claims. See my extensive coverage at the link here. Second, any large set of custom instructions on performing therapy is bound to be incomplete, contain misinterpretable indications, and otherwise be subject to the downsides that I've noted above. The nature of using custom instructions as an all-in-one solution in this arena is like trying to use a hammer on everything, even though you ought to be using a screwdriver on screws, and so on. Third, some argue that using custom instructions for therapy is better than not having any custom instructions at all. The notion is that if you are using a generic generative AI that is working without mental health custom instructions, you are certainly better off by using one that at least has custom instructions. The answer there is that it depends on the nature of the custom instructions. There is a solid chance that the custom instructions might worsen what the AI is going to say. You can just as easily boost the AI as you can undercut the AI. Don't fall into the trap that custom instructions mean things are necessarily for the better. Accessing Custom GPTs I had earlier alluded to the aspect that there is a means of allowing other users to employ your set of custom instructions. Many of the popular LLMs tend to allow you to generate an AI applet of sorts, containing tailored custom instructions that can be used by others. Sometimes the AI maker establishes a library into which these applets reside and are publicly available. OpenAI provides this via the use of GPTs, which are akin to ChatGPT applets -- you can learn about how to use those in my detailed discussion at the link here and the link here. Unfortunately, as with all new toys, some have undermined these types of AI applets. There are AI applets that contain custom instructions written by licensed therapists who genuinely did their best to craft therapy-related custom instructions. That seems encouraging. But I'm hoping you now realize that even the best of intentions might not come out suitably. Good intentions don't guarantee suitable results. Those custom instructions could have trouble brewing within them. There are also AI applets that brashly claim to be for mental health, yet they are utterly shallow and devised by someone who has zero expertise in mental health. Don't let your guard down by flashy claims. The more egregious ones are AI applets that are marketed as though they are about mental health, when the reality is that it is a scam. The custom instructions have nothing to do with therapy. Instead, the custom instructions attempt to take over your AI, grab your personal info, and generally be a pest and make life miserable for you. Wolves in sheep's clothing. The Full Meal Deal Where do we go from here? The use of custom instructions for therapy when aiming to bring forth an AI-based Therapy Mode in a generic generative AI is not generally a good move. Even if you assemble a worthy collection of the best psychologists and mental health experts, you are trying to put fifty pounds into a five-pound bag. It just isn't a proper fit. The better path is being pursued. I am a big advocate and doing research on generative AI and LLMs that are built from the ground up for mental health advisement, see my framework layout at the link here. The approach consists of starting from the beginning when devising an LLM to make it into a suitable therapy-oriented mechanism. This is in stark contrast to trying to take an already completed generic generative AI and reshape it into a mental health context. I believe it is wiser to take a fresh uplift instead. Bottom Line Answered For readers who contacted me and asked whether the ChatGPT Study Mode foretells that the same impressive results of education-oriented custom instructions can be had in other domains, yes, for sure, there are other domains that this can readily apply to. Is mental health one of those suitable domains? I vote no. Mental health advisement deserves more. A final thought for now. Voltaire astutely observed: 'No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.' We need to put on our thinking caps and aim for the right solution rather than those quick-fix options that might seem viable but contain unsavory gotchas and injurious hiccups. Sustained thinking is worth its weight in gold.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Man took diet advice from ChatGPT, ended up hospitalized with hallucinations
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