Nutrition plans

What do you mean by nutrition plan? What do you like to eat? What are your goals?

I am really liking 21 day fix by Beachbody.

Get a food scale. Weigh the foods you like. Log everything and use correct entries. This is a lifestyle change not a temporary fix.

I agree with everyone who says create your own, it's much easier.

For me, it's also much easier to cook around what I have available (especially vegetables, since I get them from a weekly farm box much of the year), and prevents stuff from going bad (and I can make the things I like and not mess with the kinds of recipe ideas in food plans, which always seem pointless and not to my taste or interesting).

That said, if you want help formulating a food plan, maybe try something like this, which is free: https://www.eatthismuch.com/

I'm struggling too. This is life transforming change we're making versus a 21-day program. I carefully weigh and track my food. The meals I like and that feel nutritionally appropriate (i.e. Macro ratio, satisfying etc) I put in the recepie and meal section so I'm essentially building my own meal plan as I go along.

There is so much trial and error involved and I'm struggling with the "just for today" "one day at a time"
Concepts each time I get off track.

Catawampous wrote: »

For some people the idea of grocery shopping can be overwhelming. I mean you walk into a large supermarket and you are trying to get on track and there is food everywhere making claims to this and claims to that and reading labels can be daunting and time consuming. Do I eat this and not this? What do you believe, who do you believe? Is the stuff on the back of the package telling you the truth, yada yada.

That's interesting; it's not something I relate to at all, but perhaps it is true.

This is how I shop: go into the store (usually on my way home from work), go to the produce section and buy whatever vegetables I need (during summer through now not much, due to the farm box), get fruit if I want it/don't have it from my box. Then if I need meat or fish, go grab that (I actually get all my meat from farms these days too, might get fish depending on the store). Perhaps pick up some smoked salmon. I will have most of the staples at home, but if I need I might grab some dried pasta or beans (canned or dried) or some grains to have as sides (depends on what I'm low on). I'll run by the dairy aisle and get some Fage greek yogurt and cottage cheese if I'm low on those, and might pick up some feta or goat cheese if I don't have enough cheese at home (I get cheese from a bunch of places). I'd also get eggs if I didn't get them from the farm. If I don't have them on hand (again, I usually would), I'd get canned tomatoes. Maybe I'll peek at the ice cream or get frozen fruits and veg too.

That's basically it. I know I'm atypical because I do get a bunch of stuff from the farm, but it seems pretty simple -- for regular shopping I'd mostly make sure I had the kinds of stables (beans, pasta, rice, grains) I like, refresh eggs and dairy, get the produce I'll be eating for the next few days to a week (depending on how often I shop), and get the proteins for the same.

I find it a million times harder if I have to look at recipes first and then buy things I wouldn't formally to go with the recipes. Much, much easier to buy my normal stuff and the vegetables/fruit/proteins that look good, are on special, or strike my fancy and then work around what I buy. Almost none of this involves reading labels or checking out new products, too.

I can't answer your question, OP, but I do understand what you are saying. Many folks on MFP have open diaries. If you find people with roughly the same calorie goal as you have, you can get great ideas from how others put it all together.

A decent starting point would be using the recipe builder to create a couple template meals to use as a base. Are there one or two breakfasts you really like that keep you full until lunch? Start the template with that. Are there things you like to eat every day? Add that and then see what other macros you need and what foods would provide those.

E.g. The things I have just about every day are eggs cooked with a vegetable for breakfast (zucchini frittata, spinach omlette, tortilla espanola, etc), greek yogurt with a piece of fruit as an afternoon snack, and legumes at some point in the day (eggs on black beans for breakfast, cabbage lentil soup for lunch, black eyed peas with Andouille for dinner, etc.). Most of my meals tend to be low fat so I use snacks to help me reach my fat minimum, e.g. 20g almonds + 20g cheese + 20g dried fruit=250kcal, 20g fat.

Once you have logged your basic meals & snacks a few times, you will have a much better feel for how variations on the basic theme will add up at the end of the day. It gets easier with experience, I promise.

I started by making lists of the lunches that I would like to take to work because I knew that would be the hardest detail to master. The first week I think I made some chicken soup in a crockpot and portioned it out into 7 to go containers and ate that all week for lunch. I looked up the calories of something similar on the MFP database. That week worked out well so then that entire first week while I was eating soup I was thinking about what I would like for lunches the next week and I came up with 2 meals to alternate. Eventually I started listing breakfasts and dinners. Now 3 months in pretty much everything I eat is already in the MFP database for my tracking so all I have to do is check it off.