Input your physical metrics, select your health considerations, and choose your current situation to generate a customized, calorie-conscious blueprint rooted in Okinawan wisdom and Hara Hachi Bu.
A note on how to use this. These are traditional Japanese and Okinawan dishes, offered as everyday cooking rather than as a medical or dietary programme. The calorie and protein figures are rough estimates from a standard formula, not a prescription, and the physiological claims describe general mechanisms rather than promised results. If you are pregnant, managing a health condition, taking medication, or have any history of disordered eating, please treat the numbers as decorative and speak to a doctor or a registered dietitian before changing how you eat.
This is a lookup table, not an artificial intelligence. There are twenty-four meals behind it: six everyday situations — the desk lunch, the late-night craving, the restaurant, the empty pantry, after training, the hotel room — multiplied by four dietary approaches. You choose one of each and the matching meal is returned. The same two choices always return the same meal.
Your height, weight, age and health focus do not change which meal appears. They only adjust the calorie and protein figures shown alongside it, and the ingredient quantities if you switch to two servings. This is worth knowing: the tool is a well-organised recipe box with a calculator attached, and treating it as anything more will mislead you.
The energy target uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the standard clinical estimate of resting metabolic rate, multiplied by a fixed activity factor and reduced by a fixed deficit. The meal figure is then a set proportion of that daily number, averaged against the recipe’s own calorie count. The protein target scales with body weight; the fibre target does the same within a capped range.
Every one of those steps is a population average. Mifflin-St Jeor has a stated error margin of roughly ten per cent for most people and considerably more for some, and it cannot see body composition, thyroid function, medication or how much you actually moved yesterday. The recipe calorie counts are estimates from typical ingredient weights, not laboratory measurements. Read the output as an orientation of the right general size, not a number to hit.
Every meal here is built on the same structure: a lean protein, a large volume of vegetables or sea vegetables, a warm savoury liquid, and a deliberately modest portion of starch placed last. This is the shape of a traditional Japanese meal, and the reason it travels well is that it produces a large amount of food for a moderate number of calories.
Two principles recur. Hara hachi bu — eating to about eighty per cent of fullness — is a practice of stopping before satiety fully registers, on the reasoning that the signal lags the stomach by some minutes. Ichiju sansai, one soup and three dishes, is a plating convention that makes a meal feel complete through variety rather than volume. Neither is a prescription, and neither requires believing anything in particular about metabolism to be useful.
Where a recipe describes what a food does in the body, it is describing a mechanism — how soluble fibre affects the rate of gastric emptying, say — observed on average and usually under controlled conditions. It is not a prediction about your next meal. The disclaimer sets out how we word these claims and why.
The situations are the useful part. Most eating that goes sideways goes sideways in a specific circumstance — the meeting that ate lunch, the hotel with only room service, the fridge with nothing in it — and having one decent answer ready for each of those beats having a diet. Pick the situation that catches you out most often and cook that one meal until you no longer need the page.
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