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.”
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.