Personal Chef · Nym and Eat This Much
Is Nym or Eat This Much better for dinner tonight?
You have 25 minutes and a tin of chickpeas. Do you want something to cook now, or a week of meals that meets your calorie target? We compared Marlowe’s answer on the Personal Chef page with the planning options in Eat This Much. You can also ask Marlowe to build a meal-plan app around your evenings.
For dinner tonight, we’d choose Nym: you can ask what to cook with the ingredients you have. If you eat to a calorie or macro target and want nutrition on every meal, pick Eat This Much. With Nym, you can also ask for a personal meal-plan app and a grocery list for the week.
The same request to both
“I have 25 minutes tonight and a tin of chickpeas. What should I make?”
What Marlowe did with it
Marlowe, on the Personal Chef page, promises to plan dinner “around the evening you actually have and what is already in the cupboard”. You can make a spiced chickpea skillet in 20 minutes. Drain the tin and fry the chickpeas in a little oil with salt, cumin, paprika, chilli “or whatever spices you’ve got” until a bit golden. Add onion and garlic if you have them, then a chopped tomato or a splash of water with a spoon of tomato paste. Simmer for 8–10 minutes. Finish with lemon or vinegar. Eat it with toast, rice, couscous, yogurt, “or just a spoon”. That last option is the honest one, and the lemon at the end is the bit people skip and shouldn’t.
No tomatoes or onions? Fry the chickpeas with oil, salt and one spice, crush a few in the pan, and put them on toast.
What Eat This Much does with it
Where Nym and Eat This Much differ
What it asks you for first
Nym
Just the two facts you gave it: your time and your tin. Spices are “whatever you’ve got”.
Eat This Much
Start with your calorie target, diet type and meal count. To use the pantry you need Premium, and you fill the pantry in first.
The plan
Nym
Ask for a small private app to plan your dinners and keep track of your cupboard. Tell your Nym which evenings you have time to cook and what you used tonight. Open the plan inside Nym on your desktop or phone. Your meals and pantry entries stay in its database between visits, ready for next week. Your Nym opens it to swap Thursday when your plans change. The plan counts as one of your two personal apps on Free or five on Plus.
Eat This Much
This is the job Eat This Much is built for, in its fixed planner. You get weekly plans with automatic leftovers, favourite weeks you can save and reload, a different layout for each weekday, and nutrition on each meal from its own database.
Groceries
Nym
You get the list written from your plan. The grocery-list generator on this site does the same in miniature: it combines recipe quantities and drops what you already have. If you’d like Nym to order the groceries, give it a retailer login and approve the purchase.
Eat This Much
You get the grocery list made from the plan automatically, with one-click Instacart export on the web if you’re on Premium.
Nutrition
Nym
You don’t get a calorie counter unless you ask. Then your Nym adds tracking to the plan app or builds you a tracker. There’s no food database, so you two look the figures up. We’d use Eat This Much if we wanted to count calories every day.
Eat This Much
If that’s what you track, stop reading and use it: the whole product is built around calories, macro minimums and per-recipe nutrition on every plan. On the free plan you get one day at a time. The annual subscription works out at $5 a month on the pricing page. Monthly billing is $8.99 through the App Store; you can try Premium free for 14 days. The App Store price is nearly double, worth knowing before you tap.
The two side by side
| Detail | Nym | Eat This Much |
|---|---|---|
| Input | Minutes and what is in the cupboard, in a sentence | Diet type, calorie target, meals per day, macro minimums, prep time, cooking ability, pantry |
| Output | One dinner with the method, sized to the time | A day (free) or week (Premium) of meals with recipes and nutrition |
| Pantry | Whatever you name; it remembers what you used | Virtual pantry used up with priority, on Premium |
| The week | A private plan app built around your evenings, kept between visits; your Nym can swap a night | Weekly plans in the fixed planner, on Premium |
| Groceries | A list on request; ordering with your approval | Automatic list from the plan; Instacart export on the web, Premium |
| Cost | Free: $5 in credits a month. Plus: $20 a month | Free one day at a time; Premium $5 a month billed annually, $8.99 monthly in the App Store, 14-day trial |
| Platforms | Web; desktop app (Mac, Windows, Linux) | iOS, Android, web |
When to pick Eat This Much instead
Eat This Much is the better choice if you eat to a calorie or macro target and want nutrition data on every recipe. You get the week generated and the groceries listed without talking to anyone. If you weigh your food, we’d choose its nutrition database over looking up the figures yourself with Nym.
Next step
Read Marlowe’s answer on the Personal Chef page, then try the meal planner on this site with the evenings you actually have and build the shopping list from it.
Try the meal planner · Explore Personal Chef
Sources
- Eat This Much: planner inputs and pantry
- Eat This Much: how-to (prep time, cooking ability, blocking foods, meal layout)
- Eat This Much: FAQ (free vs Premium, pantry priority, Instacart export)
- Eat This Much: pricing
- Eat This Much on the App Store
Reviewed . Read Marlowe’s full answer on the Personal Chef page and check Nym pricing.