As ACE Certified Lifestyle and Weight Management Consultants, we are often asked to help our clients develop supplement and meal plans.
We have our own software for developing Custom Meal Plans, and it allows us enormous flexibility in creating personalized meal plans using software designed by Registered Dietitians. This program, called Dietmaster Pro, is the best source we have found that also allows us to educate our clients in food and nutrition. We have considerable experience using the program, and as certified Lifestyle and Weight Management Consultants, it allows us to work within the scope of our expertise while affording us the opportunity to make changes based on individual needs.
We are very conscious of trainers operating out of their scope of expertise, and many of the national certifying agencies for personal trainers specifically do NOT allow for nutritional counseling. Unfortunately, it seems there are more trainers offering unsafe and unproven diet advice than there are trainers offering sound, scientific nutritional programs. We have run into our share of both, and we know the pressure trainers are under to help clients make the best progress possible. Sometimes trainers are the only source left to the client to clarify the mass of information regarding diets and supplements! However, there are liability considerations when designing nutritional programs and we are aware of them.
We have taken all the necessary steps to provide complete, well researched, nutritionally complete meal plans that comply with the national certifications.
We take our research very seriously, and we follow pending legislation along with thirty monthly periodicals, and over 20 e-newsletters monthly. We look at the science, we look at the marketing, and we look at reasons behind the development. We are also under no financial obligation to promote any specific supplement or diet products. We pay for our own products; the products we use, and the products we evaluate for our clients. This helps our clients understand when we place a value on a product; we have personally tested it and can verify the product performs as stated.
We help our clients review their eating habits, tendencies, and trends. This helps us help THEM by eliminating any destructive tendencies that can make their goals harder to reach. We LOVE food (we have a chile pepper as a logo!), so we want to see our clients eat well, and learn to enjoy food as much as we do. It surprises a lot of our clients that they actually have to eat more to lose weight, especially if they have tried a number of restricted calorie diets! Proper research and continuing education allow us to stay on top of dietary trends, hot topics, and common sense. This allows us to better explain the way an individual’s food choices can affect their performance and progress.
Our nutritional consulting sessions are very precise, goal oriented meetings. With our initial meeting, we provide our Diet Tracking Sheets, along with our GoalTracking Survey. This gives us some insight into our client’s current eating, sleeping, and exercise habits. It also helps the client by making them more accountable to their choices. Learning to spot the bad habits before letting them happen is part of the plan. Once the client starts to make choices that they know are in their best interest, we encourage them to start tracking their information in a journal, like our own 90-Day Fitness and Nutrition Journal, which is provided with most of our packages.
We like to see our clients get the maximum value out of their food and out of their exercise. We want our experiences to help them by teaching them to spot when they may be sabotaging their goals, falling into habits that may offset their hard work in the gym, and possibly affecting their quality of life.
Our counseling has helped a lot of people make the weight loss (or weight gain) progress they want, without resorting to unhealthy fads and over-hyped supplements. The result: Better choices, better progress, better quality of life!
