30 Day Meal Plan - Local Prep & Meal Delivery
The new year is here, and already we’ve heard from many St. Louis folks who are planning to use a 30 day meal plan to start making their resolutions a reality. Why so much interest? 30 day meal plans, such as ours, offer some big advantages and can deliver some major results in a short amount of time.
If you’re planning to make lasting changes to get healthier, feel better, lose weight, and enjoy more energy -- you are not alone. According to fairly recent data out of Nielsen, 67% of U.S. consumers make exercising more a goal as the new year rolls around -- and 48% plan on eating healthier meals.
Why a 30 Day Meal Plan Works: It’s Manageable
While the majority of the population in St. Louis (and in the nation, for that matter) may be planning to make sweeping changes and turn those resolutions into reality...the data shows it isn’t as easy as it sounds on paper. Only 64% of people make it to the end of January with their resolution...yikes. That means that 56% of people who start off with the best of intentions don’t follow through on their plan for even as long as 30 days.
What leads to this massive drop off?
It’s not that people don’t care, or that they don’t have what it takes to follow through (sorry Dr. Phil). The big problem is trying to plop major life changes right into the middle of an already hectic, busy, stressful, full or overflowing, life and lifestyle.
You know the old adage “you can do anything for a day”? Maybe the same thing is true for a month. If you start a resolution with no plan, no measurable steps, and no end in sight -- the weight of it all starts to bring you down (especially when you factor in an already busy, hectic, overflowing life).
When you make a reasonable commitment,, however -- for example, to a 30 day meal plan full of healthy dietary choices -- you are doing three things right:
1. With a 30 day meal plan, you have a plan in place
2. With a 30 day meal plan, you are setting easy to measure goals
3. With a 30 day meal plan, you have an end in sight
One professor of psychology at the University of Northern Iowa commented that complex goals are hard to reach -- but breaking them into small, actionable steps is the key to success.
Why a 30 Day Meal Plan Works: It’s a Commitment
Another many reason so many people don’t end up making the jump to healthy eating and/or other resolutions is simply that they aren’t doing one big thing: making the commitment. In investment projects, there is an expression called having ‘skin in the game’.
If you risk nothing, you lose nothing if it doesn’t work out...and that’s a problem when it comes to realizing goals. The concept of ‘skin in the game’ minimizes the risk and helps ensure the success of a project. How? Everyone involved needs to have something riding on the project’s success (financial or otherwise).
So, to really make a resolution work for you, you should have some skin in the game. Just deciding to make a big change doesn’t risk anything for you -- and it’s a major reason why the data for new year’s resolutions shows such massive drop offs.
Commitment is important -- but it’s often hard to commit to something too complicated, too involved, or that spans too much time. Commiting to 30 days of change by working with a meal delivery service such as St. Louis’s Pure Plates, to use ourselves as a local example, requires you to make a commitment. You agree to it, you agree to pay for it, and you have a nutritional coach to follow up with you along the way.
If you don’t follow through, you’re letting yourself down -- and you’re letting your nutrition team down.
Why a 30 Day Meal Plan Works: It Eliminates Weight Loss Obstacles
As we discussed above, making substantial changes to the meals you eat and the types of foods you enjoy isn’t easy. You have an active, full life and learning to plan for, prepare, and cook new foods is a struggle even if you have an abundance of free time with which to do so. If you’re short on time and are already struggling to find time to cook at home, trying to add in a new meal plan can be all but impossible to pull off successfully.
30 day meal plans such as the ones we offer at Pure Plates eliminate all the obstacles around changing over to a new way of eating:
- Instead of staring at Pinterest for hours and hours trying to find easy-ish meal plans that are also appetizing, you can simply choose your meals and plans online (and, ideally, you will have different options for your meal plan).
- Instead of finding time to get out to the grocery store, and then getting everything out to cook only to realize you forgot one crucial spice, you have fresh meals sourced with local and organic produce delivered to your door.
- Instead of hours of cleaning up after cooking, meal plans like ours come in recyclable, BPA-free containers that are ready to heat.
- ...and, instead of fighting hunger eating less-than-filling meals, professionally curated and prepared meal plans give you the right nutrition and protein balance to keep you full longer.
Finally, the #1 reason why a 30 Day Meal Plan can help you achieve your goals? They can really deliver results. Traditional diets are fraught with problems: crash diets lead to more weight gain, popular diet industry products often lack vital nutrition your body needs, you feel hungry and end up reaching for the ice cream late at night...and so on.
The right meal plan is one that’s based on nutrition, not hooplah. It takes stress off your plate -- and doesn’t require you to jump through a million hoops. It encourages you to make a commitment to yourself, and you have access to ongoing support to help you throughout the plan. A 30 day meal plan is a good place to start if you want to see big health changes in the new year. It’s only a month, not a lifetime -- and that makes it more manageable to stick with. Afterall, if you like the plan and are seeing the results you’ve been craving...you can commit to another month.
Bottomline? 30 days may not be a lifetime commitment, but it’s plenty of time for you to start feeling better, looking better, and enjoying the lifestyle change from choosing to eat healthy meals. 7 days won’t be transformative, committing to 60 days may seem like an impossibility -- but 30 days is doable for many people.
If you’re in St. Louis or the surrounding area, check out our meal plans -- or, if you’re long distance, check out this article with tips on finding an excellent meal plan delivery service.