A daily menu built from the food you already eat.
They assume you cook every night, that your training happens at the same hour, that nobody else in the house has an opinion about dinner, and that you will never eat at a drive-through again.
Then a week goes sideways. You break the rule once, decide you have failed, and stop. That is not a discipline problem. It is a plan that was never built for you in the first place.
This works the other way round. It starts from what you already eat and changes as little as possible, because the smallest change that actually holds beats the perfect plan you abandon in March.
The questionnaire does the work. The honesty is the only thing asked of you.
Including the takeaways, the late-night cereal and the Friday drinks. An honest answer produces a menu you are still following in six months. A tidied-up one produces a menu that belongs to someone else.
When you train, what your job asks of your body, how you sleep, any conditions or medications, what is actually in your kitchen, and what time you can realistically eat. These decide how the day is split and where each meal sits, before a single food is chosen.
Every course offers several options, most of them things you already make. What changes is usually smaller than people expect: a portion, an addition, a swap.
Not perfectly. There is room built in for the week that goes wrong, because that week is coming.
How long does the questionnaire actually take?
Twenty to thirty minutes if you take it seriously, and there is no need to finish it in one sitting. A good deal of it is tick boxes and dropdowns, which move quickly. One question asks you to write out a real day of eating, meal by meal, and that one is worth slowing down for. It is where most of the menu comes from.
Leave anything blank that you do not know. Unknown is more useful than guessed. If you are estimating, say so.
Why does it ask about medications and medical conditions?
Because they change the shape of a menu more than anything else on the form. Conditions decide not only what goes on the menu but when, and which foods need keeping apart from each other.
Iron, thyroid medication and calcium all compete with food and with each other, so the timing of a dose can move an entire meal. On one menu built this year, separating breakfast from coffee and dairy by an hour did more than any food swap on the page.
What if I do not cook, or barely cook?
The form asks who does the cooking, how much time you have on a weeknight, whether you batch or cook fresh, how confident you are in a kitchen, how many meals a week you eat out, and what equipment you actually have. If there is no oven, nothing on your menu will need one.
If you have twenty minutes on a Tuesday, nothing on your menu will take forty-five. If you eat out twice a week, those two meals get costed and listed like any other, rather than treated as a failure.
Do I have to weigh or track anything?
No. Some menus use rough weights as reference points to eyeball against. Others use hand sizes instead: a palm of protein, a fist of vegetables, a cupped hand of starch, a thumb of fat. Your hand is proportional to you, travels everywhere and needs no cupboard space.
Which one you get depends on what you say you want. Nothing here needs logging.
Why does it ask what a bad week looks like?
Because one is coming, and a menu that only works in a good week is not much use. The form asks what usually derails you, what changes about how you eat when it does, and what would actually help.
Some people need fewer decisions. Some need something in the freezer. Some need permission to eat the same thing three nights running. That answer shapes what gets built for those weeks, rather than leaving you to improvise.
It asks about my relationship with food. Why, and what happens with that?
Because it changes how a menu is built, and occasionally whether one is the right thing at all. If there is a history there, calorie numbers and tracking come off the table entirely and the menu is built on food and timing instead.
There is an option to say you would rather not answer, and taking it is completely fine. Answering honestly does not change whether I will work with you. There is also space to tell me any language around food or weight you would rather I did not use, and I will not use it.
What does it cost?
Ask me. The questionnaire itself costs nothing to fill in, and if it turns out this is not the right thing for you I will say so rather than build one anyway.
These are drawn from menus already built. Two are described by situation rather than name, because health information belongs to the person it is about.
Two Olympic lifting sessions and two long-drive sessions a week, at a time that shifts anywhere between eleven and four. A fixed meal plan breaks immediately against a schedule like that.
So the menu was built in two shapes, an early day and a late day, both costed to land in the same place. Whichever meal falls one to two hours before the session becomes the carbohydrate-forward one. Whatever comes next becomes the recovery meal. The rule travels with the session instead of fighting it.
Two road stops a week are costed and listed on the menu like any other meal. Planned for, not tolerated. Nothing gets skipped because a rule was broken.
Coeliac disease, low iron, and fainting episodes that made breakfast non-negotiable. The food itself was only half the problem.
Three rules ended up carrying the whole plan. No coffee, tea or dairy within an hour of breakfast, because all three cut iron absorption by forty to sixty percent, and breakfast is where the iron lives. Every iron dish gets a vitamin C partner, which can double or triple what actually reaches the bloodstream. And all oats certified gluten free, since standard oats are cross-contaminated at the mill.
The yogurt bowl did not come off the menu. It moved to ten o'clock, far enough from breakfast that its calcium no longer competes with the iron. Same food, different hour, completely different result.
A target weight and a date roughly a month out. The obvious answer is a sharp deficit. The obvious answer was wrong.
Rapid fat loss raises uric acid, because the by-products of fast fat breakdown compete with urate for the same route out through the kidneys. A sharp deficit over a few weeks is close to the pattern most likely to trigger a flare. So the menu was built around roughly a pound a week instead.
Steady loss with no flare and strength intact beats chasing a faster number and losing a fortnight to an attack. The slower rate was not caution. It was the version that actually reaches the target.
Not a food removed. The same bowl, rebuilt. Taken from a real menu.
A mid-afternoon standby and a pre-workout snack. Filling, quick, and no cooking involved.
Same cereal, same bowl, same two minutes. Protein stirred through and a piece of fruit added.
Three hundred and sixty fewer calories, five more grams of protein, and something on the plate that was not refined carbohydrate. Nothing was banned and nothing was replaced with a food he does not like. That is the shape of nearly every change on these menus.
What do the rest of the changes usually look like?
Smaller than people expect. A portion adjusted rather than a food removed. Something added to a meal that was already fine but incomplete. A meal moved by an hour or two so it stops competing with something else.
On one menu the biggest single change was frozen vegetables instead of fresh, because the client avoided vegetables entirely on the grounds of preparation time and avoided fruit because it spoiled. No washing, no chopping, no waste, four minutes in a steam bag. That one change unlocked most of the menu.
Does anything get taken away?
Rarely, and only where a real health reason makes it worth it, in which case the menu explains why rather than just instructing you.
On one menu built around a condition where food genuinely matters, nothing came off. The favourite dinner stayed dinner, the takeaways stayed twice a week, the cereal stayed breakfast and the weekend drinks stayed. What changed is that vegetables became easy, the mornings got heavier, and the weight came off at a rate the condition could live with.
What if I genuinely do not like a food you suggest?
Then it should not be on there. The form asks what you will not eat and whether that is taste, texture or principle, along with which vegetables you will actually eat and which protein sources you have gone off.
Every course offers several options rather than one instruction, so there is always something you can pick on a day when you cannot face the rest.
Worth saying plainly, because it decides whether this is the right thing for you.
It is a guideline built from your own habits. Follow it near enough and it works. There is no failing at it.
I am a personal trainer, not a dietitian or a doctor. If you are managing diabetes, blood pressure, kidney disease, a medication that interacts with food, or a history of disordered eating, work with your physician or a registered dietitian. A menu can support that. It cannot replace it.
The questionnaire opens with this rather than burying it. The first questions you see are about exactly these situations, before anything about weight or food is asked.
Where a condition needs medical treatment, the menu says so. One of the menus quoted above tells the client outright that diet moves the underlying marker by perhaps ten to fifteen percent, that medication moves it far more, and that they should ask their doctor about it. That line stays in.
Nothing here needs weighing or logging, and most of it is already in your cupboard.
Answer as honestly as you can, leave blank anything you do not know, and take your time on the question that asks you to write out a real day of eating. That one is where the menu comes from.
START THE QUESTIONNAIRE →
