Why I Don't Give My Clients Meal Plans

 1. I'm not qualified to do so and the only people who should be doing that are those with the correct qualifications. Most Personal Trainers are qualified to give you general good nutrition information specific to your goals but writing meal plans is not within our scope of practice.

2. They aren't sustainable. Most people can stick to a rigid meal plan for a couple of weeks and then what? What happens when there is a lovely post Covid celebration to go to? No one wants to be weighing, measuring and calculating their food for the rest of their life. What do you actually learn following a meal plan? My job as a Personal Trainer is to educate and help my clients to exercise regularly and consistently and to make mostly healthy choices for the rest of their life, does a meal plan do that?

If you want to be healthy and fit for the long term you have to find a diet that does that. Extreme measures usually give you short term results.

3. Meal plans don't care about you having a life, a proper one with unplanned meals and drinks with family and friends (remember those days!) They usually don't cater for your family, fussy kids and the responsibilities that come with a full time job, family and home life. Meal plans don't care about your food preferences, that you hate broccoli and chicken (because you know that's going to feature!). Meal plans don't care about your family traditions. Every Friday night our dinner is chicken Kiev, oven chips and peas, very 70s, it's easy, tasty and we love it so much that we eat it every week!

You diet should fit into and around your life, not the other way around!

4. Food is part of our daily lives, it's essential and it's important to be able to enjoy it and achieve any goals that improve your health for it to be successful. The way we eat needs to be dynamic and sustainable. Helping to educate my clients to build their own meal plan is an important part of my job but it's not for me to dictate what and when they eat. Finding a way to achieve their goals and enjoy the process is my main aim. If you get hangry when you eat low carb then I will help you to build a plan that allows you to be a joy to live with not a nightmare!

The best diet for you is the one you can adhere to long enough to achieve your goal. You won't be able to google that diet; you are going to have to design it and I will help you.

5. If you haven't been able to adhere to a diet in the past long enough to achieve your goal, you have not failed, the diet has failed you!

How I Help My Clients Build Their Own Meal Plan

6. I will spend a lot of time firstly understanding how my clients currently eat by way of a food diary. It's not to judge them it's to gain more information about what they are currently doing well and what tweaks they could make (maybe 2 or 3 things) to improve the quality of their meals. I do not overload my clients and completely overhaul their diet, it's overwhelming and most of my clients are far too busy to do that anyway!

7.  I will help you build a plan that works for you and your family if necessary. It's possible for you to achieve your health goals and markers and feed your family at the same time, I have helped lots of clients with a family to do that over the years.

8. We start on an A4 sheet of paper, we start with Monday to Friday when most people are busiest. Building a plan for the week means you have a shopping list in built and it means you make decisions about what you are going to eat once a week instead of every day! It saves so much time you won't believe it until you do it! Choose 5 breakfasts, lunches and dinners that you enjoy and are tasty to you. Pop them into the spreadsheet or paper. Also list some nice snacks, your favourite fruit, muesli bars and a couple of days a week add in a slice of cake, a few biscuits or a chocolate bar so you aren't building an un-realistic meal plan! We try it for a couple of weeks then we monitor and adapt it as we go until it's working for you :) 

9. Portion sizes, we can learn to guesstimate by looking over time but initially I like my clients to weigh things like rice, pasta, potatoes because these are the foods where it's important to see exactly what a portion for you looks like (obviously for men and women this can be very different but I will personalise this so you know how much to have).

10 The goal is not to be perfect. The goal for a real person with demands on them in many directions is to master imperfect action. We are striving to make better choices than we once were not be robotic and perfect and there is no need to be. 

Do the best you can. Be mindful of the choices you are making. 

Leave space to live your life.

I hope this helps and if you have questions about building your own healthier meal plan please get in touch x