I Tried MyFitnessPal's New Meal Planner Feature and Was Pleasantly Surprised by the Healthy Recipes
Anna Gragert/CNET
You're likely familiar with MyFitnessPal as an app that tracks your food intake, allowing you to log calories, weight, exercise, sleep and more. But the app's new features make it clear that it really does seem to want to be the type of fitness pal who's there for you during every step of your quest for healthy food, from planning to grocery shopping to eating.
In April, MyFitnessPal announced its in-app meal planner, a tool that creates a custom meal plan for ordering groceries directly from e-retailers like Instacart. As a wellness editor who writes about new health trends and technology, I was curious to see if this feature is worth the extra $8.34 per month (after a one-month free trial) for MyFitnessPal's Premium Plus membership.
Though the company gave me access and provided an Instacart gift card so I could test the feature, all opinions are my own.
How does MyFitnessPal's meal planner work?
I was impressed with how many different factors this meal planner uses to curate your meal plan. It asks you about your calorie target, macro targets (carbohydrate, protein and fat percentages or grams), dislikes, allergies, liked and disliked cuisines, and sides you would enjoy. To calculate your calorie target, you provide your sex, age, height, current weight, goal weight and activity level.
To narrow down your plan even more, the feature asks about which meals you need help planning, who's in your household and their diet, how often you plan to make food versus eat leftovers, recipe types you like, prep time you have available, your budget, how you like to split up your daily calories and your "approach" or diet plan.
You can specify calories, allergies, prep time, budget and more.
Anna Gragert/CNET
For your diet approach, there are 10 you can choose from:
Paleo
Vegan
Mediterranean
Whole-food focus
Low-carb
Keto
Vegetarian
Flexitarian
Balanced
Pescatarian
What my MyFitnessPal meal plan looked like
For my plan, I selected a vegetarian approach and asked for five dinner recipes with two extra nights of leftovers and three lunches over the course of seven days. You can plan from two to 15 days and include breakfast or snacks, but I had those covered. Each dinner and lunch came with a side from a list I preselected of different options. You can review each part of your plan and make swaps before it's finalized.
What my meal planner looked like for two days of dinners.
Anna Gragert/CNET
This was my plan:
Day 1 dinner: Bean and cheese burrito bowl with Mexican salad and a tortilla
Bean and cheese burrito bowl with Mexican salad and a tortilla Day 2 dinner: Burrito bowl leftovers
Burrito bowl leftovers Day 3 dinner: Cauliflower curry with glazed carrots and rice
Cauliflower curry with glazed carrots and rice Day 4 dinner: Curry leftovers
Curry leftovers Day 5 lunch: Walnut peach salad with cheddar cheese cubes and whole grain crackers
Walnut peach salad with cheddar cheese cubes and whole grain crackers Day 5 dinner: Mushroom pasta with sautéed spinach
Mushroom pasta with sautéed spinach Day 6 lunch: More walnut peach salad
More walnut peach salad Day 6 dinner: Baked broccoli mac with glazed carrots
Baked broccoli mac with glazed carrots Day 7 lunch: Hummus avocado sandwich with cucumber slices and whole grain crackers
Hummus avocado sandwich with cucumber slices and whole grain crackers Day 7 dinner: Lentil chili stuffed sweet potatoes with sautéed spinach
Each recipe is already portioned out for your household. You can view the calories, net carbs, fiber, protein, fat and sodium. If you have a food diary on MyFitnessPal, you can also easily log each recipe right in the app.
The lentil chili-stuffed sweet potato with sautéed spinach
Anna Gragert/CNET
How to order groceries on MyFitnessPal
Once you have your meal plan set, you can select what you have or don't have in your pantry based on a list of what's needed. You can also let the meal planner know when you plan to buy groceries so it can send you a reminder.
In your meal planner section, there are two tabs: Meal Planner and Groceries. Under the latter, you can see all the ingredients and amounts you will need for the plan. You can add to this list and share it. Then, when you're ready, you click the shop button and can choose from the following retailers:
Instacart (the only one available for Android)
Walmart
Kroger stores
Whole Foods
Amazon Fresh
When you pick your retailer, you're automatically redirected to its platform, where your groceries are added to the cart for you. At this point, I recommend double-checking that you have all the ingredients you need before checking out. I'm not sure if it was the app or I just missed it, but a few of the ingredients I needed didn't end up in my order. While writing this, I also did another test run and noticed that traditional refried beans, which sneakily contain lard, were added to my cart even though I selected a vegetarian diet.
You can check off what you already have in your pantry.
Anna Gragert/CNET
If you're particular about which brands you buy, I would check your cart to make sure you're getting what you want to purchase. I also found it helpful to check the cart because I didn't include an exhaustive list of all my dislikes when setting up the plan, and some of the foods I avoid made it in there. For instance, I don't drink dairy milk, so I had to manually switch that out for a plant-based option.
I imagine the more you use the meal planner and note what you like and dislike, the more tailored your plans will become over time.
How did MyFitnessPal's recipes taste?
To be honest, I was skeptical about these recipes at first. Any time a recipe is labeled as healthy or part of a specific diet, like vegetarian or vegan, I'm always concerned that the dish will compensate by cutting back on flavor. However, that wasn't the case here.
The bean and cheese burrito bowl with Mexican salad and a tortilla
Anna Gragert/CNET
I enjoyed the taste of all the meals, found that the recipe time was accurate and appreciated how simple the sides were. I especially liked that the recipes include measurements during every step of the process, so you don't have to scroll back up to the ingredients list.
The broccoli mac with leftover peach salad on the side
Anna Gragert/CNET
MyFitnessPal meal planner pros
Makes meal planning easy and less time-consuming for your specific diet or health goals
Gets extremely specific with dislikes, diet, household, leftovers, allergies and more
Nutrition tracking is built in
Groceries automatically get added to your cart at major online retailers
You can share your meal plan and recipes with other household members who don't have the app
With Premium+, you have additional features like logging with barcodes, meal scanning and voice logging
You get a one-month free trial for Premium Plus
Provides healthy recipes that actually taste good for 10 different diets
You can log your meals in your food diary
What a meal plan looks like on the app.
Anna Gragert/CNET
MyFitnessPal meal planner cons
It is part of the Premium Plus plan, which is $8.34 per month and may not be in budget for some
MyFitnessPal has both a Premium and Premium Plus plan, which is a bit confusing
You still have to double-check your grocery list to make sure all items are added and work within your preferences
You may end up with extra ingredients since it goes by what is available at your designated store
Would I recommend MyFitnessPal's meal planner?
Overall, I genuinely enjoyed using MyFitnessPal's meal planner. I loved being able to meal-plan for my specific diet and then automatically have my groceries generated and added to Instacart. Even though I know it will make my life easier in the long run, I find meal planning intimidating, so having an app do the work for me is ideal.
I plan to continue using this feature in the future, but will double-check my groceries before checking out and continue to home in on my ingredient dislikes to better tailor the recipes to my tastes.
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