Many of you want clear direction, you want to know exactly what to eat and when. You want a plan.
You’d like me to tell you what to eat so you can feel confident that you’re eating a balanced and healthy diet. I get it, that’s a very reasonable request :).
But I won’t do it. Nope. I won’t. (and I’ll tell you why in a minute, hold on )
When I first started out as a nutritionist I made meal plans all the time. They were really popular and I really wanted to make my clients happy.
But I felt so lost! I don’t know what you want to eat!
I know what a healthy breakfast is, and I know what I love…but I have no way of knowing what food will excite and inspire you. What you’ll find absolutely delicious and make you jump out of bed excited to start the day.
And that’s EXACTLY what food needs to do. There NEEDS to be a deep sense of enjoyment, of pleasure, of love.
Meal plans turn food into a chore. And that’s the opposite of pleasure.
But I made them, for every client who asked me for one. I laboured over them. I stressed over them. And I hated every second of it. It was, without question, my least favourite part of my work. Work I loved otherwise.
So I found another solution – I hired a nutritionist to make them for me. A young, keen nutritionist who was happy to take this job off my hands. But, even that didn’t feel good. It still felt torturous.
(how this work that I wasn’t even doing still felt torturous, I really don’t know. But it did)
And that would have been okay, I would have kept looking for a way to create what my clients were looking for in a way that worked for me too. I would have searched and searched, until I found a solution.
But I noticed a constant issue – NO ONE, not one single client, ever followed one. Ever.
And I didn’t blame them, I wouldn’t have followed them either. Even though they were balanced, and healthy, I wouldn’t have followed them.
This is partly because I don’t do a lot of planning in my diet normally (no, you don’t need to plan out every meal to be healthy…I don’t :). But it’s also because it’s not a real way of eating.
Simply put, meal plans don’t respect your body’s own wisdom.
They don’t let you listen to what you really want to eat. They don’t allow you to learn what your body wants. They don’t respect your cravings and desires. Your body wants a meal plan less than I want to make you one.
So many years ago I stopped the craziness. No more meal plans. No more telling you what to eat. No more disrespect to your body.
Instead, and together, we look at your cravings, your constitution, and what you like to eat and put together meal ideas that you will actually enjoy. Ones that are delicious to you. That you want to eat AND know how to prepare (an important point meal plans usually forget :).
My passion as a nutritionist has nothing to do with food. I love your unique puzzle of symptoms, cravings, and pleasures (those foods that make you SO happy when you eat them), and my passion is helping you learn your body’s own unique language.
I want to help you learn exactly what to feed your body so you don’t need me anymore. My role in your health is small, I just guide you. That’s all. It’s a (surprisingly) simple process that's really effective.
Learning how your body wants to be fed creates only one side effect – Pure Food Bliss.
Not a bad result for just a little bit of work :).