Do you have a handout that you give your clients in order for them to be able to easily follow through without weighing with certain amounts of macronutrients that they have to consume once you prescribe their diet? If so, can you make it available to us? In support of my question, I have to say that I’m referring to those clients that don’t use apps to quantify how much fat, protein, carbs they eat.

And what I tend to do now is I create what’s called a meal template. And I actually have two different tracks that people can go down within a meal template. And one I call the serving-size method and one I call the tracking method. So the tracking method is exactly what you’re saying you don’t want to do here. So I just want to describe that first, so that you can see what the difference is. So the tracking method is essentially like if someone either knows how to track using all of those apps like MyFitnessPal or Chronometer, things like that, and you’re giving them calorie recommendations or macronutrient breakdown. They can just literally plug in their food as they’re eating it and see how that matches up with what you’ve recommended. So that’s for people who, you don’t want to do that. I would say you have to have the motivation to do it because it is time consuming and a lot of people just find it kind of annoying to do on a daily basis. Myself included.

But if you have people who are used to doing that or know they would like to do that, it can be a good option. So I do offer that as one kind of way that people can follow my recommendations. But then, for most people, they do what I call the serving-size method. So essentially, I am creating a document for them where I do their macronutrient breakdown, and I then kind of see, okay, they need to eat, let’s say, I’m just going to give an example here. So let’s say they need to eat 200 grams of carbs over the course of a day. So instead of just saying that number, “200 grams of carbs,” I will say that, let’s as an example, the serving size is going to be a 25-gram carb serving. So of course they would need to eat eight servings over the course of the day to get that 200. So then you can kind of give them examples of what 25 grams of carbs actually looks like. And that doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be just, obviously, an estimation. With the serving size method, you’re certainly not going to be as accurate as if someone was actually tracking. But give them some examples of serving sizes of foods that they would normally eat that tend to be around that 25 grams of carbs level, just so they can get a sense of what that actually looks like on their plate. And they don’t have to plug it into an app every time they want to eat something to make sure that it falls within what they’re looking for.

So then I do that for each of the macronutrients, and I just give them an idea of how many servings they should be eating of that particular macronutrient over the course of the day. And then if I know, for example, that they’re somebody who eats three meals a day, I just break that into thirds and say this is how many servings of this particular macronutrient you’re going to be eating at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then if they do, if they are doing snacks, you can throw some snacks in there too and just say maybe have one serving of each of those macronutrients for your snack, and then break down the rest into thirds to do their three meals a day.

So obviously, that’s going to differ from patient to patient, but you can essentially just kind of finagle that to work with whatever kind of dietary pattern they are following and their meal timing and everything. But I do find that that works really, really well for people because as you’re probably aware—and I think actually this person may be the person who asked a kind of similar question or a related question, I guess I should say, down the the road here, which I’ll jump to right after this—this person asked the question kind of about meal planning. And I have found that meal planning does not work for people. People think they want a meal plan because they think they just want kind of a prescription of exactly what to eat every single day. But the reality is that most people do not follow a meal plan, unfortunately. They will, life gets in the way, they have to go out to eat for work or for socialization, and they just can’t follow the meal plan that you’ve described to them. And so pretty quickly, they’re gonna fall off the wagon with that and then they’re going to be totally confused as to what to eat again.

So the meal template idea I think works really well for most people because it gives that degree of flexibility. It means that they can plug and play what actual ingredients they want to throw into their diet to get those different macronutrients. And you can, of course, give them any restrictions that they need to follow. So like, if they need to not be eating FODMAPs, for example, give them a list of foods that does not include FODMAPs and tell them that those are their choices to fill in these macronutrients. And it becomes a lot easier for people, but they still feel like they have control and flexibility to really stick with this for the long term without feeling like they need to be totally stuck onto a rigid meal plan.