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.