#46 | Outsourcing all sustenance to AI

I now use ChatGPT for everything related to buying and eating food. It's amazing.

At work, the office put on a fun little competition last month. They challenged us to find creative and interesting ways to use AI. Obviously, AI is everywhere now; the trick is just finding a natural use case where it genuinely enriches life. After some trial and error, I found a winner! This has seriously changed my life.

Food is annoying

For literally as long as I’ve been an adult and on my own, I’ve detested eating. It’s annoying. And for many decades, my motto was, “I eat to not die.” And this worked for a while. In my twenties, I ate Dunkin’ Donuts, Subway, and ramen literally every single day. And then in my thirties, I switched over to Jersey Mike’s and ramen and ate that every day. But then I grew old and that motto sadly stopped working. It turns out what you eat matters and my frail stupid human body began to fail me.

I also hate grocery shopping. And I hate cooking. (These are both important reasons why I got married.) But S doesn’t really like grocery shopping or cooking either. So, alas, the challenge persisted.

I’ve tried eating healthily before. viz. Looked up YouTube videos and Reddit articles and mentally exerted efforts in that general direction. But what always stopped me was the first moment I had to make a decision in the physical world. I absolutely despise making decisions in the absence of being well informed because I usually try to research everything the best I can. What kind of bread is best? What diet is best? And all that paralysis of choice always eventually resulted in inaction.

Enter ChatGPT

And then, thank god, Sam Altman invented ChatGPT. Starting two weeks ago, I offloaded all this thankless work of food and not dying entirely over to ChatGPT. The way it works is you first need to save a few Prime Directives to memory for ChatGPT so it always remembers your overarching goal across all your chats. Like such:

Afterwards, I then asked it to construct a meal plan which it obliged. It initially recommended certain things I didn’t like (greek yogurt) or sounded too complicated (sprouts) but you can go back and forth with it asking for substitutions until you achieve something actually doable. In my case, this ultimately entailed:

1. Chicken breast

2. Potatoes

3. Smoked Salmon

4. Spinach

5. Broccoli

6. Coffee

7. Oat milk

8. Ezekiel bread

9. Almond butter

10. Dark chocolate (but only >70% cacao)

Now, virtually everything I eat is on this list or I don’t eat it.

Grocery shopping

The first challenge was when I arrived at Whole Foods to buy the ingredients. ChatGPT wanted me to buy Ezekiel bread. I looked everywhere for it but couldn’t find it so I finally asked one of the friendly Whole Foods helper people. She initially didn’t know where it was either. It turns out Ezekiel bread is in the FREEZER section. Apparently, it has sprouts and stuff in the bread which requires refrigeration. When I finally got to the right place though, my heart fell. It was my arch-nemesis: CHOICE. FOUR different kinds of Ezekiel bread?!?! 🤦‍♂️ At this point, I felt the irritation welling up in me, my determination evaporating like Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential run. But then I remembered: TECHNOLOGY!!

I snapped a photo and asked ChatGPT what to get and it told me the EXACT ONE:

Crisis averted!!

Btw, I’ve since learned I can actually buy nearly everything ChatGPT suggests from Trader Joe’s— so that’s been much more budget friendly:

Meal logs

With every meal I eat now, I snap a photo first and submit that to ChatGPT. It then analyzes and calculates the calories and protein. Apparently, these are the only two things that matter. (Nothing else in the food pyramid is important, apparently.) So, for example, this is a typical log entry:

ChatGPT will keep a running total of exactly how much you consume each day. I eventually discovered that ChatGPT has folders too so I started organizing each day’s log in its own folder:

One learning: for my weight and height, I’m supposed to eat ~2,100 calories every day. (Or ~1,600 calories, if I’m trying to cut weight.) It turns out: this is a TON of calories. I used to only eat when I was hungry. But now I feel like I am always eating. The upside though: my energy is indeed better! I used to just feel exhausted all the time. It turns out, I previously just wasn’t consuming enough calories!! 😮

Here’s what a typical day looks like now:

Eating out and exceptions

Actually, that day was out of the ordinary because that was Sunday when S and I met some friends to eat out. Luckily, when I wander off the reservation, ChatGPT can help too! You just snap a photo of the menu and ChatGPT tells you the EXACT answer:

and then log it:

(Eventually, ChatGPT learned what to do and I can just upload photos without any text too.)

So, this is basically my life now:

And if I ever wish to introduce a new item, I always ask first:

And now, whenever I’m in the real world and faced with CHOICE, I always ask first. Like, previously, I’d be swayed by things like beautiful packaging or ads or Google searches or what Reddit said or what the store helper person recommended. No more!! ChatGPT to the rescue!!

Or if I’m at the office (our office offers us free snacks!), I ask too. (It turns out, for years now, I’ve been eating the wrong snacks. 😭😭😭)

Other misc tips

One heads-up though: ChatGPT is naturally, annoyingly, sycophantic and it’ll initially hedge its answers so you need to bully it in the beginning so it’ll be direct and actually useful. eg. Two weeks ago, after lunch at the office, we walked across the park to an ice cream parlor and everyone got ice cream. Naturally, I asked ChatGPT first but it gave me this useless nonsense:

After you reprimand it though, it’ll then give it to you straight:

So that was the day where everyone got ice cream except for me. I followed the advice of ChatGPT!! 🎉

Free will isn’t important everywhere

Again, I can’t recommend this enough. This small example of AI has unequivocally changed my life. I’ve literally just outsourced all of my sustenance to ChatGPT. The knowledge that I’ll never need to make any decisions ever again for the rest of my life regarding food has honestly brought me so much joy. (And S is happier now too because cooking now just mostly entails putting stuff in the Magic Pot or oven. Sam Altman has helped my marriage!! 🥳) When I reflect on what our future world will look like with AI, I imagine that AI will simply be everywhere and helping us with all the things we don’t want to do, but need to do. And for me, that was food!! What a time to be alive!! Thank you, ChatGPT!! 🚀