Kelsey Kinney: Okay, yeah. So as I mentioned before, I don’t do meal plans and I don’t do shopping lists. I don’t do anything like that. Because as I mentioned before, really people just do not stick with it. If anything, so what I include is the food choice list. I mean, you could essentially kind of consider that a bit of a shopping list. Like, those are the choices that they can choose from for their food categories. And so those would, of course, be the things that they’re going to be picking up at the grocery store and kind of stocking their pantry and their fridge with. But do a weekly shopping list, for example, to make all the recipes that I am prescribing to them? No, absolutely not.
And as you’ve kind of realized, this gets super, super, time-consuming, and then combine that with the fact that people end up not following them, to me it’s just kind of a recipe for disaster here. So really like the meal template approach, I think it’s way, way better both for you as the clinician and your clients. So I would highly suggest kind of moving towards that. And what I do is I basically created a standard meal template and then I just customize it for each person. So essentially, I have basically a huge list of foods to choose from, and then I’ve annotated a lot of the foods on that list with “this is high in FODMAPs” or “this is high in histamine,” “this is not on the AIP diet.”
So if I have somebody who I want to have them on the AIP diet, what I do is I just bold that so they see what the annotation looks like and then anything on that food list that has that annotation, they know they can’t eat that food. So they just ignore it. So that way you can kind of use the same document for everyone, but you personalize it a little bit. And then of course I write there whatever I’ve calculated their calorie needs to be, and then whatever I’ve calculated their macronutrient needs to be on their particular meal template document. So again, there is a bit of customization that goes into this each time you’re going to do it, of course. But the process is a lot faster if you kind of come up with a set document that you essentially can use with everyone with small tweaks. So I hope that helps.
Again, this kind of took me a long time to figure out. So I would really just see what your clients are asking for, and don’t be surprised if a lot of your clients are asking for meal plans. But really what they’re looking for is guidance and just having some sense of what to eat every day in terms of their food choices. A lot of people say they want a meal plan, but that’s not exactly what they mean. So I’d really probe your clients to truly figure out what they want and then try to create a document that you feel like you can personalize to each person to use with your clients.