7 reasons why building a healthy eating plan is so hard.
So you went back to running a few blocks again and even renewed your subscription to your awesome gym and have been consistently visiting it, but you’re beginning to get that familiar feeling again – you’re working your butt off and don’t see the results you expected. Well, I’m guessing that by now you’ve encountered the saying that for good results you need 30% workout and 70% diet, and if you’ve read our post about plateaus, you already know the importance of a good meal plan and measuring your progress to verify results. But we already stated that you know you need a healthy eating plan, so why is it still so hard? Understanding and knowing the problem is half the battle, let’s focus a bit on a few of the reasons.
1. The basics – how to start building a healthy eating plan
We don’t mean the points as mentioned in the 7 simple diet tips, which are great general guidelines, we are talking about estimating how many calories you are burning and how many you need to consume based on you and your goals.
There are several approaches to this, but to focus on two:
- Based on your current daily intake – This usually means tracking and documenting for a week or so everything you’ve been eating, then translate the data into number of calories, and based on the result and several other parameters (such as physical activity level) understand how many calories are required of you to consume.
- Using formulas such as the Harris-Benedict equation, Miffin St. Jeer or Katch-McArdlewhich are a good starting point if you don’t have extreme over or under-weight issues.
Now even if you know these rules and are an expert at solving mathematical equations, it still doesn’t solve our next issue.
2. What macro-nutrient ratio to use
So you’ve crunched the numbers and know you need an intake of 3000 calories per day, now what? How does this break down into protein, carbs and fat?
This one is a bit trickier than the previous point as it depends on several factors such as your body’s metabolism speed and type (Generally speaking: ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph), what your goal is and what your body reacts to best. Here you’ll find an abundance of offers which are usually too generic and aren’t the best for you, but could offer a decent starting point. One such offer encountered a lot is if you’re trying to gain muscle, consume 40% Protein, 40% Carb and 20% Fat. This option is a great example of a generic solution which most likely can be replaced with a better alternative tailored for you.
But you’ve got your healthy eating plan split all figured out and field tested, how do you eat now?
3. Abundance of plans
Low carb diet, Carb cycling, Caveman, Atkins, every now and then a new and healthy eating plan rises promising us it’s the best healthy eating plan or diet out there, so which should we choose? Having so many plans out there is good, but it usually just succeeds in confusing us, possibly leading us to try out a trendy plan or one with some buzz-word we heard which doesn’t fit us, eventually leading the plan to fail.
In addition, more often than not we decide down the line we want to switch plans but fear the complexity of switching – switch now? to what? and start building a plan all over?
But let’s assume your training buddy tried an amazing plan that caused him to look like an oiled refrigerator just like you wanted so you decide on following his healthy eating plan as well, what now? What do you actually eat every day and every meal?
4. Deciding what to eat in every meal
Here comes the heavy step of taking all that you’ve calculated and done so far and breaking it down into things that actually enter your mouth, and here a new set of questions arises: What’s considered a good food item to eat? How many calories and macros are in it? Is that before, or after cooking? What is a good time during the day to eat sugary foods? Is the food item complete protein, or do I need to make sure I eat something that completes it as well? Anyone who went through this in the past knows that he’s got his work cut out for him.
OK, so we quickly went over what it takes to build a healthy eating plan and we talked about the problems you encounter during developing a meal plan, let’s mention now a few of the problems with the existing solutions
5. Time Consuming
You believe in hard work and that it’s the only way to see results, after all you’ve been running like a cheetah up and down the block for the past few months, so you decide to simply put in the effort and prepare a healthy eating plan. No doubt it will eventually bring a good personally tailored meal plan (assuming you follow the steps correctly), but oh, it is so time consuming, the bare thought of getting down to preparing a good meal plan intimidates many and drives them to look for ‘instant’ solutions.
6. Available plans are generic
If you’ve ever visited a nutritionist to help you build a healthy eating plan, you can usually see it takes them a very short time to build a meal plan, so how do they do it?
The explanation for that is that many nutritionists (but not all) have basic guidelines and some templates for meal plans which they follow too quickly.
The problem with this is that it doesn’t go deep enough into your routine and preferences, personal taste and sensitivities, crunching the numbers and finding the plan that will best fit you, in order to see results as quickly and effectively as possible.
Same thing like above, by the way, happens with the plans you usually find on the web today – one size fits all, with minimum space for changes (usually you can, at best, play with some portions)
Given you do get a plan in one of these methods, or even through a completely different method, then you usually have to stick to it vigorously with no ability to introduce change.
7. You like to mix things up from time to time
Almost every method to building a healthy eating plan we’ve encountered had the same problem – it’s barely flexible. If it’s a good plan you could update the portions along the way, which we know is an absolute must driven by one’s actual results, but what if you decide you don’t feel like chicken for dinner anymore and want to switch to fish? Here the problem starts to surface…
We are just human, and we like to mix things up from time to time, so fitness gods, give us a solution for it!
Final notes
We didn’t touch on every issue that exists in preparing a healthy eating plan such as how to introduce portion changes to your meal plan and to what item exactly should they be introduced or deciding how many meals during the day should one eat (assuming the information is not stated as part of the diet or the healthy eating plan), We simply tried to cover the big issues we usually encounter.
Building a healthy eating plan is not a simple task, but given we understand its importance and we solve most of the issues mentioned above, we are sure to see results, and truly understand that fitness is 30% workout 70% diet.
Good Luck with your healthy eating plan!