Everyone asks you for a meal plan, but should you give them one? Dietitian Lucy Carey gives her thoughts on meal plans.

It’s what everyone wants. At least, it’s what they think they want.

A written plan that tells them exactly what to eat, when to eat it, and how much of it to eat. Sounds perfect, right? No need to think about what you’re packing in your lunch or making for dinner. You just follow the plan and hey presto, you have the perfect body and perfect health.

But it doesn’t actually work like that. This type of meal plan is really just setting clients up to fail. Not only do they not account for variations in hormones throughout the month, or variations in physical activity, or, for younger clients, growth spurts, they don’t teach anything either. They encourage clients to ignore their hunger and fullness cues, instead of learning to eat intuitively.

But the truly grotesque thing about these meal plans (I know grotesque sounds harsh, but hear me out) is that when clients inevitably don’t stick to them rigidly, they feel like a total failure. They think it’s their fault. That they don’t have enough willpower or self-control to stick to a meal plan. And those feelings make it far more likely that your client will binge eat when they fail to stick to the meal plan.

So, in essence, meal plans are just like diets. They don’t work, yet everyone wants one, and everyone blames themselves for not sticking to it instead of blaming the system itself!

So if you’re not going to give your client a specific meal plan, what are you going to do?

I still give out meal plans to some of my clients. But they are purposely extremely loose, with no amounts specified whatsoever. They’re more of a list of ideas for meals and snacks, than an actual meal plan. And I always include a backup option, which is essentially what will you do if you’ve run out of time for breakfast (or whatever) and you’re rushing around. What can you have in the cupboard or fridge ready to go?

I never give meal plans out to clients who are still working very hard on their all-or-nothing attitude to food, because it’s far too easy to treat even a loose plan as a bible to follow rigidly. If I suspect that I client will struggle with a meal plan, we just don’t do it. Instead, at that stage of their journey, we’ll probably just focus on having meals and snacks throughout the day and we won’t even write it down.

So why do I even give meal plans out at all if they’re so fraught with potential danger?

• They emphasise the importance of regular, consistent eating throughout the day.
• They teach that you can plan things out (like what you’re going to have for dinner) whilst retaining the flexibility to change things depending on how you feel. This is how our clients who have learned to eat intuitively need to be able to function in real life.
• By not having amounts specified, it shows that how much you eat should be determined by your hunger, not by a calculation.
• It gives structure to think about contingency plans.
• It can be used to emphasise what foods to include in the day (not what to exclude), e.g. vegetables, fruit, dairy, protein, wholegrains, etc.