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• They already fit into your ideal meal plan
• You feel confident preparing them
• They emphasize the most important changes in your diet
• You don’t have to think about them too hard

Hey ,

Are you still looking for the perfect meal plan, or spending more time reading about food than actually cooking? Ever wonder why so many people working as health and nutrition professionals offer nutritional advice for free?

They all know that absorbing the advice is the easy part. It’s the disconnection between receiving good information and building healthier habits that leads us to seek their professional, one-on-one guidance and encouragement. If that disconnect didn’t exist, they’d all be out of a job and we’d all be in perfect shape. Working with a dietitian or personal trainer can give you a great advantage in this regard, but if don’t have access to one, you can still reach your goals with a little self-observation.

The idea is to self-observe and then adjust your actions as a way to turn your existing habits into healthier ones. It’s much easier for a dietitian or personal trainer to notice where you’re slipping up in your diet because we often become blind to our own habits and routines. Consider taking on the following challenge as a way to step outside those routines and identify the mistakes you’ve made so you can avoid them in the future.

Some of the best changes are super obvious when you examine your current diet objectively:

You can do this in an excel file or a google doc, but fine-tuning the weekly planner in ETM is a huge time saver. Tracking what you eat is super easy with the "I ate this" feature (Here's a quick tutorial about tracking what you eat.)

If you haven’t started a free trial yet, using the weekly planner will give you the ability to make and track changes faster than the 30 minutes you’d spend waiting for a pizza delivery. Let us know how you did on the challenge.

- Louis, Patrick, Erin, Matt, Riley, David, and Tim
   The Eat This Much team

Good morning !

By the time you receive the next update in this Eat This Much series, we’ll have been discussing nutrition and diet strategies for a longer period of time than the average diet lasts.

Let that sink in.

It’s the perfect example of how using your time efficiently makes all the difference in the world. What you do within a minute, afternoon or entire day can easily distinguish between success and failure in the long run.

How well have you been using your time lately to reach your goals? Are you simply researching nutritional info and diets or are you creating and following a plan that includes reasonable, healthy, goal-oriented meals? As we discussed in the last few emails, preparation is important, but action is paramount.

While we can’t all be CEOs, NBA players or Hollywood stars with their assistants, coaches and personal trainers, respectively, we can use the tools found in ETM to make the most of our time. From the daily and weekly generators to the blocked foods list and the huge database of branded and restaurant foods, ETM makes it that much easier to stay on track. If you haven’t checked out all these features, log in right now or start your free trial.

Use your time wisely and give yourself all the support you can. If you have any questions, let us know at contact@eatthismuch.com. We got your back!

- Louis, Patrick, Erin, Matt, Riley, David, and Tim
   The Eat This Much team

Hello ,

Thanks for sticking with this guide so far! Do you ever feel like the changes you want to make are just out of your reach, despite appearing easy to accomplish? This brings us to one of the best tips for turning around even the most hopeless diet - 100% of the time.

The tricky thing about setting goals is it must be something you’re not already willing or able to do (or it wouldn’t be a goal, right?) But it also can’t be something so far beyond your comfort zone that it’s too distant to make progress toward.

Take the “Five-A-Day” mantra that’s been promoted by various health organizations for nearly three decades. You’d think that eating enough vegetables and fruits to satisfy it would be easy, right? Not so fast - less than a quarter of Americans hit even 3 servings a day, and that INCLUDES potatoes prepared as chips and fries.

With that in mind, how confident are you that you could start eating five servings of fruits and veggies a day? It’s only 3 cups worth of food, so what’s the big deal? The answer depends entirely on how far that goal sits beyond your comfort zone. If the goal is so close to your comfort zone that you’d be embarrassed to tell a friend or family member you failed to hit it, you’re in the right place!

The biggest benefit to these goals is the immediate feeling of accomplishment when you DO achieve them. That’s the kind of motivation that will keep you going. Here are some great examples of “too-easy-not-to-hit” goals:

Whether or not you decide to use our service, or believe anything in these emails, we hope you do yourself the favor of starting to work toward your goals RIGHT NOW. Really, there’s not one single reason to put it off. When you take the time to choose goals carefully, one-by-one, you make a habit of success. Mark your calendar every day you meet your small goals and soon enough you’ll have the momentum of a streak going.

It takes 21 days to make a habit; even if you’re starting from zero you could be eating seven servings of fruits and vegetables effortlessly within six months. 7-a-day reduces risk of death from any disease by more than 40% [1], with your risk of cancer dropping by one quarter!

So set some simple goals and get ready to feel great about reaching them. Everyone here at ETM is rooting for you!

- Louis, Patrick, Erin, Matt, Riley, David, and Tim
   The Eat This Much team

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26818377 and http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2014/04/08/7-fruit-veg/

Hey !

Persistence. It’s a rare treasure, and definitely worth its weight in gold. Some days you might have plenty to keep chasing your goals. Other days... not so much. Today’s update is all about specific strategies for using Eat This Much to optimize the time and energy you spend on meal planning, which ultimately helps keep your reserves of motivation and persistence nice and full.

(If you have any questions about the following features, please email us at contact@eatthismuch.com or refer to our Tutorial Library and How-To guide.)

Hack Your Hunger - While keeping your macros and calorie goal the same, use the Meal Type options to control things like prep time and meal complexity (click the meal name to make changes). Not a breakfast person? No worries - make your first meal of the day more of a snack. Get super hungry in the afternoon? Shift your lunch a little later in the day without throwing your dinner off. Hacking your meals to suit your hunger is the best way to leverage your personal tastes and energy patterns for success. For every lean, athletic person who feasts before the sun rises, there are just as many strong, healthy night-owls who don’t start eating until the afternoon. It’s all about adjusting the number, size and timing of your meals to fit your body’s rhythm, while still hitting your goals.

Build on What You Already Do - Using ETM to augment your existing diet with small changes is not only easy, but very helpful in the long run. For example, if you manually load your day with a breakfast and dinner you’re comfy with (think Staple Meals), the Generator will fill out the rest of your day to keep you on track. It’s the ideal blend of familiar and experimental, comfortable and adventurous.

Controlled Variety - Speaking of familiar vs. adventurous, use the Recurring Foods option to keep a set of Staple Meals in your rotation throughout your week without having to manually search for them. Use the Favorites tab in the sidebar to easily drag over multiple recipes without changing screens.

Stay Stocked - Staying prepared is crucial and the ETM Pantry makes it easy to quickly see what you do and don’t have on hand. Start by buying some basics in bulk and load them into the pantry. That way the generator will provide suggestions based on your stockpiles. Budget Friendly Tip: Set ready-to-go foods like whole fruits and veggies as recurring snacks to boost your diet AND prevent fresh food from going to waste.

With your goals firmly in sight, these strategies will staying persistent and positive about changing your diet much easier. The more you arm yourself with information, preparation and guidance, the better. Keep going - we believe in you!

- Louis, Patrick, Erin, Matt, Riley, David, and Tim
   The Eat This Much team