The MyFitnessPal app is known for its food-tracking features, which allow you to log calories, macros, micronutrients, weight, exercise, sleep and more. But its continually added new features make it clear that the app really does want to be the type of pal who’s there for you during every step of your eating journey. 

At the end of April, MyFitnessPal announced its in-app Meal Planner, a tool that creates a custom meal plan you can use to order 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 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. 

For your diet approach, there are 10 you can choose from:

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.

This was my plan: 

• Day 1 dinner: Bean and cheese burrito bowl with Mexican salad and a tortilla
• Day 2 dinner: Burrito bowl leftovers
• Day 3 dinner: Cauliflower curry with glazed carrots and rice
• Day 4 dinner: Curry leftovers
• Day 5 lunch: Walnut peach salad with cheddar cheese cubes and whole grain crackers
• Day 5 dinner: Mushroom pasta with sautéed spinach
• Day 6 lunch: More walnut peach salad
• Day 6 dinner: Baked broccoli mac with glazed carrots
• Day 7 lunch: 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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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

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.