Meal plans don’t work as a long-term weight loss solution for this one simple reason
Meal plans are a popular idea for weight loss and I can totally understand why! When you’re changing your eating habits you want ideas of new healthy foods and you want them to taste good, so a meal plan should fill both of those needs, right? It makes sense logically, but meal plans don’t actually work for long-term health and weight loss. Which is why I never use them with my clients.
Meal plans sound amazing, but when it comes down to it, people don’t stick to a meal plan! They might follow it for a few weeks, but then it’s too hard to make a new extravagant meal every night, or you can’t stand the food in the meal plan! So what do you do? You go right back to your old habits and you give up.
If you want to be healthy or lose weight, then you have to change more than just your diet. You have to change how you see yourself.
Long-term weight loss isn’t about dieting
When we’re on a journey to lose weight, we tend to focus on the actions we need to take. We need to prepare healthy meals. We need to drink our water. We need to exercise. We need to get enough sleep. And while all of those are important things because they help us build healthy habits, they’re only part of the equation.
Being healthy isn’t something we do. It’s who we are. Real health and long-term weight loss aren’t about diets or exercise programs. If being healthy is just something that we do, we’ll get tired of doing it, we’ll quit and we’ll go back to who we are - someone who eats according to their taste buds and emotions.
I want you to become someone who IS healthy not someone who DOES healthy things. Instead of being someone who diets, you need to identify yourself as someone who makes healthy choices.
When you just diet or follow a meal plan, you’re just pretending to be a healthy person. You’re taking what someone else has decided is healthy and you’re pretending to be them so that you fit their version of healthy.
Your brain is going to fight that because it’s not you. In order to live a healthy life, you have to look deep inside of yourself for the healthy version of you. Then you need to bring that healthy version to the surface and let her shine.
Being healthy needs to be part of your identity
One of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear. In Atomic habits, he gives an example of what an identity shift looks like: Two smokers who are both trying to quit smoking are offered a cigarette. The first smoker says, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.” The second smoker says, “No thanks, I’m not a smoker.”
The second person is changing their identity. They do not need a cigarette because they no longer identify as a smoker. They’re changing the way they view themselves because they don’t want to go back to who they were.
In my Macros Made Easy program we say, you are a healthy person on day one. You aren’t a healthy person when you lose the weight, or consistently meal plan, or exercise every day. You are a healthy person right now because that’s what we were built for!
We confirm that identity when we make healthy decisions and then encourage ourselves to keep building on that identity when we celebrate our wins, big or small.
You won’t ever be successful in your health or weight loss until you make this identity shift. Because when you identify as a healthy person you’ll lean into those healthy decisions. You won’t want to give into food temptations or cheat on your diet because that won’t feel in alignment with who you are.
You are one decision, one thought away from being the healthy person you want to be. You don’t have to be a do-er of diets anymore. You have the chance to step into your healthiest identity. To see that healthy woman, to celebrate her, to lift her up, to understand her. If you haven’t ever done that, then it’s time.
Let me show you how to step into your power and your nutrition. Schedule a free discovery call with me and we can unlock your healthy identity together. Stop doing healthy things and start being healthy.
