PlateJoy: Customizable Healthy Meal Plans: How It Works

Are you as overly stressed as I am when dinnertime rolls around each night?

There is this idea that we should be providing healthy dinners for our families, but I find that it is too hard to find nutritious, yet yummy, tasting food that will satisfy the picky eater in my family. (Okay, it’s me. I’m the picky one.)

PlateJoy has been not only a dinner saver, but a delight! Can I say that about a questionnaire? It is so thorough, that I almost giggled with happiness when I got my weekly meal plan.

You should really just stop what you are doing and click here now, to see just how awesome PlateJoy is. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

Personalizing Your Menu

If you are like me, you probably have stacks of cookbooks and hundreds of saved recipes on Pinterest or Facebook. But when it comes to actually choosing a meal, shopping, and then preparing it, dinner becomes too hard!

Why is it hard? For me it’s because just about every single recipe seems to have SOMETHING in it that one of us doesn’t like. And, while we are willing to try new things, we know – absolutely know – that we will never like peppers!

We also know that we absolutely cannot have some common foods that we are allergic to. So I can spend hours looking at recipes only to wonder if it is even worth trying to alter the ingredients to fit our life.

A bunch of different low carb recipes with the title healthy customized meal plans and when I say customized I mean customized

This is where PlateJoy comes in.

Let me tell you – it is REMARKABLE and FLEXIBLE beyond anything else you’ve tried before!

I was skeptical at first, but then I spent three weeks studying and playing with the website. Now I’m basically an expert. 🙂

It was so much fun!

Let me walk you through my discoveries at Platejoy.

First of all – everything is CHANGEABLE! You can choose one style of eating one week, then a different one the next, you can change everything and anything before you actually go shopping! Total flexibility!

A plate of keto chicken broccoli and salad. with a sign that reads complete this questionnaire and get personalized menues and shopping lists to help you lose weight

Platejoy starts by gathering information about you and your family. You fill out a Personalized questionnaire, again – totally changeable whenever you want to change it, so don’t spend too much time overthinking it!

“Do you want to lose weight?”

This is one of the important questions that it asks, so it can apply that aspect into the menu. “Do the other people in the family want to lose weight? Yes or no”. It plans that as well.

It asks if you have restrictions,

Are You Limiting Carbohydrates?

Do you want to be:

Low Carb,
Paleo,
Mediterranean Diet,
Diabetic/Prediabetic,
Ketogenic,
30-Day Cleanse,
or Low FODMAP?

Click one and that will frame the menus Platejoy offers. Change your mind, click another one, and that becomes the framework.

Then you are asked about meat:

No Restrictions,
No Red Meat,
Pescatarian,
Flexitarian,
Vegetarian,
and Vegan.

It asks:

Clean Eating?
Gluten Free?
Dairy Free?
Kosher?
Pregnant/nursing?

And it asks how strict you want your carbs to stay under.

Then comes the magic: Are There Ingredients You Prefer to Avoid?

This is my gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow!

It has an interesting list that you can check of common foods that people don’t like. AND THEN a spot for Other Ingredients and you can type in what else you dislike!

I started with a few ingredients, and over the three weeks of playing with it, I got more specific and have ended up with 28 OTHER ingredients that I never want to see in a recipe!

I guess I’m a lot pickier than I ever imagined.

A close up of a plate of low carb avocado. with a title that reads has being a picky eater stopped you from losing weight? well no more! your ideal dinner awaits

Platejoy will not present recipes to me that have any of these ingredients as part of the dish! (Maybe it would if the ingredient was optional, but so far, I haven’t seen it.)

If you come across a recipe later that has something in it that you won’t eat, you can just add it to your list!

But Wait! There’s More!

I am not even done with all the ways PlateJoy customizes to your needs.

They don’t just ask food questions.

What type of store you usually shop in?
What are some basic kitchen tools that you have on hand?
What kind of milk, bread, rice and pasta does your family prefer?

You are asked if you like to batch cook – making larger batches and have leftovers or only making 1-2 servings at a time.

Then it asks about each meal and what your preferences are for:

breakfast,
for lunch,
for dinner,
desserts –
including how much time you want to spend on each recipe per meal.

A close up of a keto homemade pizza. with title custom meal plans that work with any diet absolutely any diet

When you have answered the questions – the CHANGEABLE questions – then you are ready to create your menu!

Your Meal Queue:

Platejoy will put recipes into your Queue.

You will see a photo of the dish, how long it takes to make, and are given the option of Removing the Recipe Permanently.

If you click on the recipe’s Nutrition Info, you will see the ingredients. If you realize that you actually don’t like a certain ingredient, you can add it to your list!

The recipes in the queue are the ones that will be rotating through for your weekly menu.

You will be able to say how many breakfasts, lunches, batches, dinners and snacks you want to prepare for the following week and if you want leftovers.

I don’t know if the Queue grows, but I do know that after fixing a dish, you can mark it a favorite and it is added to your list as such.

The menu is generated not only based upon your questionnaire, but which recipes go together in such a way that saves you money at the grocery store. Awesome!

You will see your recipes for the week.

By clicking on the “card” you can see the HOW TO for the kitchen work.

You can remove a card that you don’t want for the week and you can add additional cards from your queue. Of course, adding additional cards might not match your weekly calorie goal or your saving money at the store goal, but you have that flexibility.

Some weekends, I have family over – that often means over 30 people. I plan for that with Platejoy!

Calendar

Platejoy has a Calendar that will take the recipes for the week and lets you drag and drop to which days you want to fix which recipe.

SHOPPING!

The shopping list is pretty awesome as well. It is automatically generated based on the recipes THEN it asks about your pantry – what you have on hand – and takes those things off of the shopping list AND you can add other things to the shopping list (paper plates, anybody?)

Once your list is complete, it can send the list to Instacart so it can do the shopping for you, or you can use the list to send to your favorite Pick-Up grocery store, or it will send the shopping list to the cell number you put in your account.