How to build a client's meal plan in under an hour

A meal plan for a client is six decisions, taken in order

To create a meal plan for a client in an hour, make six decisions in a fixed order and refuse to reopen the earlier ones. The order is the energy target, the protein floor, the shape of the day, a shortlist of meals the client already eats, the food data, and the swaps. Plans take three hours when a coach starts at the recipes, because every recipe added changes the arithmetic of every recipe already chosen.

The clock below runs against a 72 kg client starting a fat loss block. Those numbers carry through every section, so you can see what each decision costs the one after it.

Minutes 0 to 10: set the energy target and the protein floor

Two numbers decide most of the plan, and neither of them comes from a recipe. The first is the energy target, which comes from what the client is eating now. Setting a client's calories from their intake answers is how we get to it; for this example it lands at 2,000 kcal a day.

The second number you can read straight off a position stand. The ISSN's 2017 stand on protein and exercise puts the useful daily range at 1.4 to 2.0 g/kg of body weight for most exercising people, and at 2.3 to 3.1 g/kg for resistance-trained clients trying to hold lean mass through a deficit. At 72 kg, 1.6 g/kg is 115 g of protein a day.

The direction of travel is not a judgement call either. The ISSN's stand on diets and body composition says that diets focused on fat loss are driven by a sustained caloric deficit, and that the leaner the client, the slower the loss should be to protect lean mass.

Write 2,000 kcal and 115 g at the top of the page. Do not touch either of them again for the rest of the hour.

Minutes 10 to 20: write the shape of the day before you write any food

The next decision is how many times the client eats and what each occasion has to carry. It sounds like a detail and it is the whole hour, because a plan with a grid gets filled in and a plan without one gets solved from scratch at every meal.

The same ISSN stand is specific about spacing:

These protein doses should ideally be evenly distributed, every 3–4 h, across the day.

Four occasions across a fourteen hour waking day fits that. Divide the 115 g floor by four and each occasion carries 29 g, which sits inside the 20 to 40 g a serving the same stand recommends, and above the 0.25 g/kg it gives as the per kilogram version of the same rule. Divide 2,000 kcal by four and each occasion carries 500 kcal.

Now the page holds a grid of four rows, each row worth 500 kcal and 29 g. Nothing you do for the next forty minutes changes those four rows.

Minutes 20 to 40: shortlist eight meals the client already eats

This is the half of the hour worth spending, and the only place where knowing the client beats knowing the research. Read the intake answers for what they cook now, what they will not eat, and how long they will stand in a kitchen on a Tuesday. Then pick eight meals out of that list, two for each row of the grid.

Eight meals, each used three or four times, covers the twenty-eight eating occasions in a week. That is a plan a client can shop for on one trip, which matters more than variety:

The long-term success of a diet depends upon compliance and suppression or circumvention of mitigating factors such as adaptive thermogenesis.

The same stand says that approaches from low fat to ketogenic can be similarly effective for body composition. Read that as permission: the eight meals do not have to match a named diet, and arguing a client out of the way they already cook costs you more than it buys.

Two habits keep this step at twenty minutes. Write the meal as the client says it, not as a recipe title, so "the chicken thing with rice" goes on the page under that name. And leave one row empty on purpose, for the meal they eat out, because a plan with no gap in it is a plan they break on day four.

Minutes 40 to 50: take every number from one database

A meal plan is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is only as good as the food data under it. The USDA's FoodData Central holds several data types, and they are not the same thing: Foundation Foods and SR Legacy carry analysed and legacy composition data, Survey (FNDDS) carries the foods used in national dietary surveys, and Branded Foods carries label data from manufacturers. The same chicken breast appears in more than one of them with different numbers.

Pick one data type per plan and stay in it. A plan that mixes an analysed entry for chicken with a label entry for rice has an error in it that nobody can find later, because both numbers look right on their own. The data are in the public domain, so the source is free to check; the cost is only ever the looking up.

We built Peas & Pans for this step. Reading a recipe page, matching its ingredients and writing the totals into a plan is about ten minutes of typing per meal that no coach should still be doing by hand, and it is the one part of the hour a machine does better than you.

Minutes 50 to 60: write the swaps, not a second plan

The last ten minutes decide whether the plan comes back to you on Wednesday. Give each row two swaps: another meal that hits roughly 500 kcal and 29 g, written in the same plain words. Eight swap lines, no new recipes, no second document.

Swaps are cheaper than revisions. A client who cannot face the plan's lunch either eats something untracked or messages you, and the message costs you fifteen minutes and a reply. A swap line costs you thirty seconds while the grid is still in front of you.

Then stop. The plan is four rows, eight meals, eight swaps and two numbers at the top, and it is finished at minute sixty whether or not it is elegant.

What to cut if the hour is really forty minutes

Some weeks the hour is not there. Keep the first ten minutes and the last ten, and let the middle go rough: the targets have to be right because everything hangs off them, and the swaps have to exist because they are what stops the follow-up. The eight meals can be six, and two of them can be repeats of what you wrote for another client with the same protein band.

Do not cut the grid. Ten minutes deciding that the day has four occasions at 500 kcal and 29 g is the cheapest ten minutes in the hour, and a plan built without it takes longer at every step that follows.