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has anyone of you ever tried a randomized week long meal planner for dieting ? If you have read the 4 hour body delegating the cycle to an alogrithmen makes a lot of sense in my opinion. I'm happy for any suggestions for a 80 % solution.

Honestly, I'm just to lazy to think about the whole leftovers - buy - cook - eat cycle. I end up munching instead leftovers all the time. So I like to try something new - randomization since flipping coin decisions are fun, why should meal planning not be.

My criteria , 15 min max, low carbs and cheap.

I want title, picture, ingredients and prep guidlines. The ingredients I like to aggregate to a grocery list. If possible serving and shopping sizes are also available as additional constraints - I don't like leftovers (I would munch them).

Preferably there is some kind of API for this :).

Tks for suggestions.

Georg Summer
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  • Just pay [somebody else](http://www.e-mealz.com) to plan for you ;) That's what we do. Very cheap per year. – rfusca Feb 24 '12 at 23:01
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    Sorry, we don't support product recommendations here, nor questions on health or dieting. – Aaronut Feb 24 '12 at 23:59
  • And if their sample menus are typical, they should be labeled something like "quick and easy." Heavy on processed ingredients and light on veggies. – Carey Gregory Feb 25 '12 at 00:04
  • You could start with [Gourmet Recipe Manager](http://grecipe-manager.sourceforge.net/) and if your Pythonish skills are good enough you can easily add a plugin to randomly select recipes :) – nico Feb 25 '12 at 07:58

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Why not list out the recipes yourself, say onto cards or something, and then randomly draw them - by pulling cards from the box, or by numbering them and rolling dice, or whatever. Then build the week's shopping list from the list of meals. If each meal is balanced there's no need to write code to optimize for the week. And since you have free will, if you pull 3 meals in a row that are really similar (meatloaf, hamburgers, shepherds pie) you are free to swap Tuesday and Friday, or to toss one back and draw again.

If you plan to eat leftovers roughly half the time, don't draw 7 meals for a week, draw 4. In our house, certain meals have "official" leftover dishes that are made from them. You could just write that on the card: "make leftovers into pulled pork sandwiches the next day."

Kate Gregory
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