Why Meal Planning Alone Won’t Work:

Unpacking Your Food History for Long-Lasting Dietary Changes

Meal planning can be super helpful!  And also, it has its limitations. 

It really does make sense to come up with some go-to meals that meet your specific dietary needs.  We have enough things to think about most days, and the last thing you want is for your diet to feel like a burden.  So I do actually support spending time coming up with some key meals that you can prepare with minimal thought and effort.  I also believe it is important to spend as much time (if not more) figuring out broader strategies that are custom-tailored for your life and your diet, because meal planning has a short shelf life….

A rigid structure can lead to burnout.

Sticking to a pre-made meal plan can feel restrictive, and over time, the rigid structure may lead to frustration or burnout. Life events, changing schedules, or even cravings can disrupt the plan, making it harder to sustain.

It doesn’t foster long-term independence, leading to dependency on the plan.

While meal plans offer a short-term solution, they don't teach people how to make their own food choices. Once the plan is over, folks may feel lost and unsure of how to continue eating within their dietary needs.

It neglects personal preferences.

A pre-made meal plan may not fully account for personal food preferences, cultural traditions, or individual food histories, making it harder for people to enjoy their meals and stay engaged.

It doesn’t address emotional or psychological factors.

Meal plans overlook people’s emotional relationship with food. Many people have complicated relationships with food due to past experiences, stress, or emotional triggers. Meal plans focus on "what" to eat but don't help address the "why" behind someone’s eating habits, which is essential for lasting change.

Doesn’t Encourage Creativity or Exploration.

By strictly following a meal plan, people might miss out on experimenting with new foods, recipes, or cooking methods that could help them enjoy their diet more and stay consistent in the long run.

For meal planning to work, we need to tell our stories first.

Our early food experiences shape our adult eating habits, sometimes in profound ways, particularly when influenced by factors like trauma, gender socialization, country of origin, family cultural and religious practices, physical abilities and neurodivergence, queerness and socioeconomic status.  I truly believe that before I can help you make changes to your eating habits, I need to ask you lots of questions and hear your stories to better understand your dynamic history with food.  

And the research backs me up on this.

The past few years have been filled with rigorous clinical research on the topic of storytelling and its connection to making lasting, meaningful changes in the diet. I could go on and on here, but I’ll do my best to keep it brief.

Ethnographic interviewing is a qualitative research technique that involves gathering detailed insights about a person's experiences, behaviors, and cultural context through open-ended, in-depth conversations. The primary goal is to understand how individuals perceive and interact with their social world, focusing on their lived experiences rather than seeking to confirm a hypothesis. It emphasizes listening carefully and allowing the participant's narrative to guide the interview.

“Foodlife stories describe the patient’s eating patterns and cultural edibility filters (‘what’s good to eat and not eat’) that develop over time, within the context of shared food culture, and individual taste memory and meaning-making attached to food and eating. This is the elephant in the physical exam room, and why a pizza is not just carbs, fat, and calories, nor glorious dough, red sauce, and mozzarella cheese. Pizza can be a guilty pleasure, a marker of identity, or what is affordable and accessible. Pizza can also mark the moment you found out that your parents were getting divorced. Pizza is as much desires, anxieties, dreams, as it is nutrients.”

~Standard Patient History Can Be Augmented Using Ethnographic Foodlife Questions

Similar to Ethnographic Interviewing, Motivational Interviewing is a person-centered method of guiding to elicit and strengthen personal motivation for change. “The four central principles of MI include reflective listening, developing discrepancy by identifying differences in the patient’s held values and their current behaviors, overcoming or “rolling with” resistance by responding with understanding and empathy, and building the patient’s confidence through self-efficacy.”

~ Nourishing Conversations: Using Motivational Interviewing in a Community Teaching Kitchen to Promote Healthy Eating via a Food as Medicine Intervention

Both methods can be useful in addressing eating habits. Ethnographic interviewing digs deeper into cultural and personal narratives, while motivational interviewing directly targets behavioral change through motivation and self-reflection.  Ultimately, there is an ever-growing body of research that clearly demonstrates how vital it is for people to tell their stories about food in order to make lasting, meaningful changes in their eating habits.

SO THAT’S WHERE I COME IN…

I use approaches from both interviewing styles so that I can understand your history as best I can while helping you achieve the goals that you and your practitioner have set together. If the two of you have decided that a change in food habits is best, then it is best to start at the root of the matter, with your untold stories.  Then we can move on to the more obvious practical matters of buying and preparing food together, which may or may not involve a meal plan.

Beyond Meal Plans:

Empowering Yourself to Make Food Choices that Fit Your Medically Specific Diet

It’s a huge deal to decide with a practitioner that a specific diet is a vital part of a medical treatment plan. For many people, it can be very overwhelming, even disheartening.  Also, given the context of the medical nature of the diet, it is completely understandable that a person would be craving a prescriptive meal plan to reduce overwhelm and to keep things feeling clinical. 

The truth is that special diets exist in some liminal space, where it both is and is not medical.  To make a meaningful change, both of these truths need to be recognized, validated and supported.  A meal plan recognizes the clinical aspect of the situation, but not the humanity of the situation.  So much emotion and sensory experience goes into how we procure, prepare and consume our food.  A meal plan can’t account for all of that all of the time.  

So how do we find the balance between planning meals and tending to our humanity?

It starts with your stories.

If you read my article “Why Meal Planning Alone Won’t Work”, you will know that I believe (and modern research supports) that we need to start by talking about your history with food. 

Through thoughtful and empathetic questions about your personal history and social location, we can have a conversation about how all that has led to your current food habits, preferences and aversions.  That’s the humanity piece, and it’s where we start.  From there, we can start to come up with a unique plan that accounts for all your sensory, cultural, emotional, and dietary needs at the same time. 

It continues with your groceries.

The next thing to consider are your food purchasing habits.  I see grocery-getting as the precursor to meal-planning.   For some people, getting the food is more than half the battle. Sometimes the barrier is financial, sometimes it is sensory, sometimes it is about time restrictions and sometimes it is about impulse control.  Before making a meal plan, I think it’s important to get a firm understanding of how you get your food in the first place. 

When learning how to accommodate a new diet, it’s important to not try swimming upstream.  We can do that by assessing current grocery-getting habits and making a meal plan from there.  This is logistical, yes.  But it is also part of the humanity piece, and it is connected to your stories about food.  

It ends in your kitchen.

The final piece is getting into your kitchen and talking about the way you approach food.  Every single person has a different relationship to food storage and preparation.  In order for a meal plan to work in the slightest, it needs to take into account the individual person it is working for.  Making a simple, easy meal plan for a food enthusiast may not meet their human need for culinary excitement and effort.  Making an exciting meal plan for a food utilitarian may not meet their need for ease and speed.  For people who avoid eating all together, it may be less about making a meal plan and more about finding individual food items that can be easily stored, reached for and consumed with minimal effort.

You contain multitudes, and your dietary plan should to!

For some people, at the end of the day, they will still want to have a weekly meal plan laid out for them. Between neurodivergence, food aversions, time and financial restraints, and mental overload, meal plans really can make a lot of sense for some people. And I truly am happy to help people create those meal plans.

My college education and work experience have given me loads of practice with planning meals, accounting for all the dietary specifics, portion sizes, preparation methods and cost analysis. Once I feel confident that I have learned all I can about your relationship with food, I will feel confident in making a meal plan that works for you specifically.