How Effective Meal Plans Are?

Meal plans suck. That’s the very short answer to the question, but let me explain it to you in more details why. Many experts and personal trainers recommend a specific diet style or philosophy, and many of these work as well for a while. After couple of weeks or months however people usually realise that things are not so simple and straight forward.

Often when people sign up for a personal training package their excitement level is high. They are keen to start and see the results they expect. At this stage sticking to a pre-designed meal plan is also much easier. You suddenly cut unhealthy food and start filling up your fridge with lean meat and vegetables. Brown rice replaces white rice and no more alcohol. So far so good and with a well designed workout program weight starts to go down as well. Actually the strategy can be really simple. If you stay on this track for a good couple of weeks or months, your results will come much faster too. Let’s say you’ve been determined and followed every workout and meals like a good student, and after 3 months you’ve improved your physics. That’s great but what’s next?

What many people often miss and forget is that achieving results is relatively easy, maintaining results is a completely different story.

Meal plans only work until you follow them, which means as soon as you want MORE FREEDOM, you might going to lose the results in a certain period of time. Let’s have a couple of examples of what might happens:

• You’re going back to the office after a lockdown and meal prepping becomes difficult or inconvenient.

• You get bored with your meal plan.

• You get busy after a new baby or a new job.

• You get ill or a family member gets ill.

• You frequently need to attend social events where ‘you need to eat’.

• You travel a lot and your preferred meals are not available.

• Your family although happy to see that you want to change, but they just want to eat ‘normal food’. And most probably after a while you too.

These are some of the possible and most typical scenarios where your plan to adhere meal plans can start breaking down and ‘cheat meals’ become more frequent. And be fair enough these things happen to everyone from time to time. Then you might start saying: “Alright! I’ll start again next Monday” or next month, or after my holiday, or… You know what I’m talking about 😉

So what else can you do instead of trying to stick with meal plans yet to get results that can be maintained? You need to change your lifestyle and eating habits for good! And making drastic and sudden changes won’t do the trick on a long term.

That’s why you need behavioural strategies, and small changes a time to create SUSTAINABLE HEALTHY EATING HABITS that will bring long lasting results for the rest of your life!

Unless you’re preparing for an important event like stepping onto stage during a fitness competition or getting married and you need to get in shape fast for a certain day, meal plans won’t take you any further!

If you need help or don’t know where to start reach out to a personal trainer in Kuala Lumpur who is experienced and qualified in behaviour and nutrition coaching.