3 Meal Plans You Can Actually Trust

Changing your eating habits isn’t easy. It takes a lot of thinking, planning, and understanding to learn just what foods you should and shouldn’t be eating—but honestly, who has time to figure all of that out? Not most people. Fortunately, there’s a fount of meal plans available in the world for you to choose from. Unfortunately, it can take almost as much time to figure out which ones are worth the money and time. Don’t spend hours of your precious time reading through the diet section in the book stores or raking through Google search results.

The following meal plans offer specific plans, scientific explanations, and recipes to help you change the way you eat, how you feel, and how you look. Major life changes, especially changes relating to eating habits, are hard to stick with, but it becomes easier when you have a strategy to guide you through the experience.

Tone It Up’s Nutrition Plan

The Tone It Up girls Karena and Katrina offer pretty much everything a health-centric woman could want, but the crux of their program is the Tone It Up Nutrition Plan. This plan offers more than a basic outline of what you should eat and plain recipes. It breaks down the reasoning behind the plan by explaining different categories of foods and their benefits, when you should eat certain things for maximum results, what kind of foods to pair together, and so many recipes you’ll never get bored. The plan is extensive and meant to be followed for life rather than for a limited time. However, it’s not a plan that will leave you feeling deprived of anything.

Because of its scope, the plan costs $150. That seems steep, but it’s a lifetime membership. You pay the fee one time and then receive the foundation plan, plus every single past seasonal plan, future seasonal plan, and detailed eight-week meal plans that supplement the Tone It Up challenges. You receive a membership to the Tone It Up community, which provides a support system of other women looking to better their health, and exclusive access to products, retreats, and information from Karena and Katrina.

The nutrition plan comes as a PDF download for you to save to your devices or print out, and you can also choose between the regular plan, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, gluten-free, and gluten-free pescatarian plans. So no matter what your dietary restrictions, you can find a plan that works for you and your body.

Lauren Gleisberg’s Eat Your Way Lean

For a more affordable, delicious, inclusive option, you really can’t beat Lauren Gleisberg’s Eat Your Way Lean Meal Plan. It’s only $26 to purchase the download and receive 50 recipes that follow along with Lauren’s method of eating for physical results. In Eat Your Way Lean, she explains the science behind her meal plan and tells you when you should eat, how you should eat, and how much you should eat. Her approach is created specifically to make eating enjoyable and healthy.

The plan follows three main rules, so it’s easy to keep track of yourself without becoming overwhelmed. The best part is that her recipes are actually food you want to eat. Everything has a healthy spin of course, but she’s not telling you to eat birdseed. There’s pasta, healthy desserts, and even clean pizzas. In addition to all of that, there’s the #LGAccountability community on Instagram for you to lean on when you need some motivation. Other followers of the meal plan post images and recipes of their own creation (based off of the three rules in Eat Your Way Lean) for you to test out. You can find them using searching “#eatyourwaylean” on Instagram. It’s a major bonus for those days when eating clean and sticking to your goals seems too hard.

Whole 30

The Whole30 plan is an extreme meal plan. However, it’s also incredibly healthy and effective. The main purpose of Whole30 isn’t to lose weight. It’s a happy side effect that your body physically changes, but following the plan is about how your body feels and learning which foods have a negative impact on your body. Some of the positive results include better sleep, clearer skin, improved allergies, weight loss, reduced cravings, reduced headaches, and improved relationships with food and body.

Whole30 is planned out just for 30 days, but you can stick to it for longer periods of time if you want to. A major benefit of this program is that after the 30 days, you can reintroduce a specific food you suspect of causing allergic reactions or digestive issues to determine if that food is the problem. In the 30 days on the program, you’ll eat a lot of protein, vegetables, some fruits, and good fats (nuts, seeds, oils, etc). But you can’t consume anything with added sugar, alcohol, grains, legumes, dairy, or additives of any sort.

The plan is very specific, and very rigid, but it’s also free. Like the other two plans, there’s an online community you can go to for meal ideas and support to get you through the 30 days. If you’re looking for an extreme dietary change to completely transform your relationship with food and heal daily aches and discomfort, Whole30 is the plan for you.

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