So if not meal planning, then what?
Meal planning vs Planning Meals
As a Nutritionist and Nutrition Educator, I do not recommend meal plans with my clients very often. And when I do, they come after several others strategies. Yet, meal plans are still one of the most requested services I see. That might have you asking ‘if they are so in demand, why don’t you use them?’ It’s a good question. The answer is; because they don’t work. Not very often, and not very well.
Meal planning works on the premise that you completely change the way you eat all at once.
It usually involves a nutrition professional creating a general meal plan for healthy eating or an individualized one that addresses your dietary and lifestyle needs.
The first option, the general meal plan, often is designed to address a specific dietary outcome (Gut Health! Low carb! Keto!).
These meal plans are often one of two things:
- An interpretation of dietary guidelines in a plan format (in an example, the Australian Dietary Guidelines)
- A diet
They do not address your individual nutritional profile, lifestyle, activity level, or preferences in both cases.
Nutrition professionals can create individualized meal plans to suit your specific dietary and lifestyle needs and preferences. Nutritionally they are likely able to suit your needs. But there are a few problems.
Problems with meal plans
- Meal plans force significant changes to happen all at once. This degree and pace of change are unsustainable.
- Meal plans don’t allow changing circumstances like vacations, sick kids, and the festive season. They are difficult to adapt to when things change.
- Meal Plans are often a complete change to your eating habits, which takes a significant amount of time and energy to implement. They can add a considerable amount of stress to an already busy lifestyle.
At the root of it, meal plans don’t teach you how to make decisions for yourself. They don’t equip you with the nutrition tools to make the decisions for yourself. And they only work in a very controlled setting – when you have access to everything in the plan, and you are in your kitchen. When outside of that setting, meal plans are not much help.
There is something else to consider. It doesn’t matter how good the plan is; you will get bored of it. If you don’t know how to plan for yourself in time, you will either go back to how you did before or be stuck paying for another meal plan.
Meal plans and mental health
I work with a lot of people who are making changes to the way they eat while at the same time experiencing challenges to their mental health. A key factor they taught me is that any food and dietary changes have to work on the bad days and the good. On the surface, a meal plan might seem to do by removing decision and choice from the equation. However, they do not usually include HOW these tasks will be accomplished, particularly on difficult days. They don’t have the flexibility to accommodate change. And they often result in not only the guild of perceived failure but of rotting veggies in the fridge and wasted food in the garbage.
What to do instead
So, if not meal plans, then what? Can you plan for the changes to want to make without a meal plan?
Yes, and here are things you can do instead of a meal plan. As a Nutritionist and Educator, here are three things I do with my clients instead of a meal plan:
- Nutrition education. Learning about what different foods do for your body and their role in your overall diet can help you make simple changes to the way you already eat.
- Nutrition advise. Getting advice about changes you make to the way you eat can help you achieve your goals. Usually, this will involve completing a five-day food journal to work out where you are now in relation to where you want to be. This advice, combined with nutrition education, can equip you with the tools to make the changes you need and the ability to adapt them over time.
- Habits. Instead of making changes all at once in a meal plan, using a habit-based approach to dietary changes is an achievable and sustainable strategy to change the way you eat.
At the end of the day, the truth is meal plans can work for some people. If you consider using a meal plan, make sure you prepare it with someone qualified to make food and nutrition recommendations.
In my experience, the path to long-term success can’t be short-cut by jumping to the result, a completed plan for eating every day. Success comes from the process of learning how to make food-based choices that work for you and support your mood, energy, health, and lifestyle.
Hi! My name is Kristine Peter and I’m a Nutritionist (ANutr) and Nutrition Educator (MEd). I work virtually with women who struggle with stress, anxiety, low mood and energy to teach them food habits to create the nutritional building blocks for balanced mood and energy levels.
Learn more at www.kristinepeter.com or reach out at kris@kristinepeter.com.
