Meal planning for 20 clients a week in one afternoon

Meal planning for nutrition coaches is a batching problem

Meal planning for twenty clients, one plan at a time, is twenty hours of work, which is why the evenings go. Done as one batch against a shared meal library, the same twenty plans take about four hours: twelve minutes each, in one block, on the same afternoon every week. The hours come back because the repeatable parts get decided once, for all twenty, instead of twenty times.

The roster below is twenty clients. The arithmetic holds at twelve or at thirty; only the length of the block moves.

Your twenty clients sit in about four protein bands

Twenty clients do not have twenty protein targets. The ISSN's 2017 position stand on protein and exercise puts the useful range at 1.4 to 2.0 g/kg of body weight a day for most exercising people, and 2.3 to 3.1 g/kg for resistance-trained clients holding lean mass through a deficit. Apply that across a normal roster and the answers land between about 90 g and 170 g a day.

So set four bands, 20 g apart: 100 g, 120 g, 140 g and 160 g. Every client rounds to the nearest one. A 72 kg client at 1.6 g/kg comes out at 115 g and goes in the 120 g band, which is a 5 g move, well inside the range the stand gives for that body weight.

Do the same on energy, in 200 kcal steps. Four protein bands against two energy levels for each, a deficit and a maintenance one, is eight target sets for twenty people. Eight is a number you can hold in your head on a Tuesday. Twenty is not.

A standard process still gives every client a different plan

The objection to batching is that it turns coaching into a template mill. The dietetics profession settled this question years ago. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics runs the Nutrition Care Process, a standard sequence of four steps: assessment, diagnosis, intervention, then monitoring and evaluation. Every registered dietitian works inside it, and the Academy is direct about what it does not standardise:

Using the NCP does not mean that all clients get the same care.

Twenty clients walk the same four steps and arrive at twenty different plans. The same holds for a planning batch: every client goes through the same six decisions, and the answers differ. How to build a client's meal plan in under an hour sets out those six decisions for one client, and the twelve minutes below is that same hour with the slow parts already done.

The slow parts are not the ones that feel slow. Choosing the target takes seconds once the bands exist. Finding and costing the food is what eats the evening, and it is identical work for every client in the same band.

Forty meals cover twenty clients for a month

Build the library before you build any plan. Forty meals, ten for each of the four slots in a day, each one tagged with its protein and its energy so it can be dropped into a band without recalculating anything.

Forty meals sounds like a project. It is one sitting. Our own import limits are the measure of that, and they are published:

One hundred imports in a day is a full working day of building a recipe library.

The limit is 30 recipe imports an hour and 100 a day, so a 40 meal library fits inside two hours. The 550 checked recipes in the starter library need no import at all. That is what Peas & Pans is for, and it is the only part of this workflow where software beats a spreadsheet by a wide enough margin to be worth paying for. Clients, plans and storage are not limited, so the library is built once and reused across the whole roster.

After the first build, the library needs maintenance, not rebuilding. Replace eight meals a month, a fifth of it, and the plans stay current without anybody starting again. Eight imports is five minutes.

One library serves clients who eat very differently, which is the part coaches doubt. The ISSN's stand on diets and body composition says that approaches from low fat through to ketogenic can be similarly effective for body composition, so the library does not need a section per diet philosophy. It needs enough meals at each protein level that nobody is stuck.

One block a week beats one plan a night

Put the batch in one named block: the same afternoon, every week, in the calendar, with clients booked around it rather than into it. Four hours for twenty plans, and the twelve minutes each breaks down as follows.

• One minute to place the client in a band and an energy level.
• Five minutes to pull eight meals out of the library into the four rows.
• Three minutes to write two swaps for each row.
• Three minutes to write the one paragraph that is only about this client.

That last three minutes is the whole difference between a batch and a template mill, and it is the part to protect when the block runs late. A client can tell that the meals came from a library. They cannot tell whether you thought about them, unless you write down the thing you noticed.

Protect that block harder than anything else in the week. Planning done in the gaps between sessions expands until it has taken every evening, because nothing marks it finished. A block ends when the twenty are done.

The follow-up is the cost, so write the swaps in

The plan is not the work. The work is the messages from clients who cannot face Tuesday's lunch, each one costing a recalculation and a re-send. Twenty clients at one message each is more time than the whole planning block, and the messages do not arrive in a block.

Two swaps per row, written while the band is in front of you, is thirty seconds that removes most of those messages. It also removes the quiet failure, the client who stops tracking rather than telling you the plan does not fit their week. The ISSN's stand on diets and body composition puts compliance at the centre of whether a diet works over the long run, beside the metabolic adaptation that works against it.

Compliance is a design problem in the plan, not a character trait in the client. A plan with eight swap lines in it is a plan with eight fewer chances to fail silently.

What to cut first when the afternoon runs to six hours

If the block runs long, the cause is almost always the library, not the clients. Six hours for twenty plans means people are being planned for from nothing, one meal at a time, which is the twenty hour version wearing a calendar entry.

Cut variety before anything else. Two meals per slot instead of ten is a thinner library and a faster block, and the client who wants more can be given more next month. After that we would cut the number of bands from four to two, and accept that a 100 g client and a 120 g client eat the same meals in different portions.

Do not cut the per-client paragraph or the swaps. Those two are the only parts of the afternoon the client can see.