And in the snap of a finger, those four hours for one patient, five patients a day, 30 a week, how many hours are we losing that we're not financially charging for, but that we are Personally paying for, in fatigue, in loss of social interaction, all those sorts of things locked in the office. There's this great personal price that we're paying by not automating things that we can.
Yeah, for me it was time away from my kids and my wife. And here I was, cause you, you, like, again the volume of people that you just spoke about, if you're seeing that amount of people through the week. Not every one of them can get a meal plan, that's impossible.
Welcome to How To Build A Profitable Nutrition Business. If you love nutrition, and you love helping people, and you want to be in the game long enough to keep doing that, then this is the podcast for you. Let's get into it.
Today's guest is a lady by the name of Sandi Jerry. Sandi is an honors student at La Trobe University who has just undertaken some research on meal planning software. So obviously as the owner of MEALZEE, a meal planning software solution, this piqued my interest. Now, quick disclaimer, I had zero influence over the design or outcomes of this study, but I was consulted and our users were offered the opportunity to provide their insights into the study.
So Sandi's coming on today to discuss the impact for nutrition professionals on meal planning software. So as nutritionists or dietitians or naturopaths, meal plans are what people come to expect when they come to see us, but there is a little bit of resistance and friction within the industry. So can meal planning software help our business and help our clients?
Well, you'll have to listen. Let's get into it. Welcome back to another episode of How To Build A Profitable Nutrition Business. Today, I'm super excited to introduce you to the amazing Sandi Gerry. I'm sure by the end of this episode you'll appreciate how much energy Sandi has. She has a contagious energy that has been a pleasure to work with and us have crossed through some much needed research.
Now, Sandi has just completed an honors, honors project through La Trobe University, which has actually looked at the effectiveness of meal planning software. Now, a disclaimer here is MEALZEE has had no influence over the outcomes of this study, but obviously being meal planning software, we were able to provide our insights and access to some of our users to, to participate in the research.
And it's been fascinating reading for me, but it's just a really great insight, I think for our podcast listeners to appreciate where other people are at and what their thoughts are around meal planning software. and how it can really help your business. And so, Sandi, what is it that drew you to this field of research?
Because there's not a lot of research in this space. Previously to doing Honours, there was another degree that I'd done and it, part of the coursework was to be in a clinic environment where we had clients, patients coming in and their expectation was really that they would have a script for it. Um, some supplements, and then they would also have a diet or a meal plan to go home with.
They were lacking some really good modeling, and we're heavily surrounded with advertising of what, what a meal looks like. It, which is generally from us that are there, is nothing like it should look like, and it, there's a lot of confusion. And for me, I've been on that side where I just don't know where to turn and it's really hard.
So you go and you see your dietitian or your nutritionist and you walk in and they tell you all the wonderful things about how much you should have and what you should have and increase and decrease and all these things. But then you walk away and you think, what have I got in my fridge? What have I got in my cupboard?
Can I cook? What do I need? I'm going away. What do I do with this? And a meal plan is really a great answer to that. It's a great response to that hole for the person that needs that experience. And so when I saw this study, and I thought it was really interesting because it was asking. What's the perceptions from the health care provider, from the nutritionist, from the dietician, from the holistic coach?
What is their idea of supplying a meal plan? And what do they think about the platforms to assist them in doing this? What are they looking for? Why are they using them? Why aren't they using them? Because they're a great tool, right? I wanted to know more. What do people think? I love it. Everything you've said there, basically, is the kind of runways that led us to build MEALZEE, because I was the same, and there's actually a bit of, and we'll get into this, you may have picked up, but there's a bit of resistance to meal plans in the dietetic space in particular, and I was one of them.
Like, here I am, I've gone and created meal planning software, where Because they're fairly new. MEALZEE, we've only released two years ago and we're not finished, so the build is still happening. So the options, particularly here in Australia, were not great if you wanted to go and create a meal plan for someone.
And the reason I hated meal plans is because it would take me hours, like a significant amount of time, to put the meal plan that I wanted together for someone. It was so much work, and then I wasn't confident that it was actually helping them. And that could be for a whole range of reasons, and so I actually had an old lady, older lady come in and she diagnosed, she was diagnosed with IBS, I believe, and she, she wanted a meal plan right or wrong, and I'm like, I'll teach you how to do it, blah, blah, blah.
And she, she got short with me, she's like, it's alright for you, you know what you're talking about, this is foreign to me. And so that, that was the point that we went and decided how to build, we needed something that we could do it quicker with. But, there's still a lot of resistance and I think in the dietetic space, it's not teaching anyone to follow a meal plan, but we can do both.
You can give someone a meal plan and teach them. It's not one or the other. It's definitely something in the data, Chris, that when we, when I was reading around what I looked at and what I did find was that there seems to be, in other people's studies, this great big gap of where. Does it fit into our nutritional care plan?
Where do we fit that in and how do we as the healthcare professional facilitate that emerging of it? Exactly what you've said is exactly what the data says and that is that if I don't know where to put that meal plan into my care cycle. Where do I fit that in? And then if I, on top of that, don't know where I fit in to facilitate the introduction of that, then it's not going to happen.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So why do you think this is such important research then for health professionals? Look, there was a couple of reasons that I came in and I think with any research, you try and stay a little bit out of it as the outsider looking in so you can get the greatest experience from what you're finding.
But coming in, for me, I thought, As a new practitioner, I've got to build my bank of resources, and I have to trust the resources so that when I'm busy, when I'm tired, when I'm out of time, if I pass off some admin work to my husband, that he can just push go. I can say, do you know what? Can you just send this meal plan to this person.
Everything else is templated. Just attach and go. And I need to be confident that's there. And as a new practitioner, as a business, it's only been around for three years and even as a person going into someone else's business where there's minimal resources, that amount of exhaustion just thinking about it is a nightmare.
So, you know, then you step away from the whole process and your client's not getting that great experience that they may be expecting or want from you. And time poor. We, we all hear it. We all know what it feels like. Sometimes we don't know how we got there till we're already there. And this is one of those tasks that can be to a point automated.
There's minimal input that You need to put into a meal planning software that spits out this huge amount of data and information for your client. You're going to have one, ones that people really resonate with. What we found through the studies were things that had recipe cards, great photos, how to step by step, a shopping list, a little bit of interaction so that they tweaks, options.
If I don't like sultanas, I can take them out and everything's going to be fine. So they're the things that people wanted. And so that really brings down that, that fatigue level, not only during the day, but that day on day. And we're recording today. And for a lot of people, it's their first day back at work.
Over the next few weeks, it'll be first day back at work and kids at school. And if you're in this role where you then also are coming back to work, and the first thing people want after Christmas, the media will tell us everyone wants to get back on track, or they've got a New Year's resolution, or they're really feeling that they've undone all their good work from last year.
And so, That is going to be a huge amount of people's work and it's going to be a huge amount of those stopgap clients or patients that you see where best intentions and they really need to be set up to go forward and one of those key tools for them is modelling on what it looks like and you just want to set them up for the best and so if you give them the whole process, which a meal plan will do, that's really helping them between the appointments.
Yeah, that's right. And that's the job of the health professional then, isn't it? To communicate that benefit. Absolutely. But that time saving feature that you spoke about, like for the health professional, one of our users with meals, he said to me that she would spend four hours, she'd just spent four hours the weekend before creating a meal plan for someone, for one client.
Now, her hourly rate is 150, 200 an hour. That's an expensive meal plan. But as health professionals, we tend to be Like, we just wanna help people. We don't think of that cost, do we? Like, we're not and, and we don't think of that personal cost to us. So we don't think we, we ne we sit down and we do our business plans.
We all sit with our tax guy and we sit with our accountants and we sit with our business advisors and we do all these things. And they say, how much are you gonna charge? Or How much do you wanna earn a year? to keep your lifestyle and how much is your business going to cost. But when we say we might want to say we want a bit of a nice work life balance and we might want three or four really good clients a day.
That's what we want. And so we work out how many of those And how much is it going to give us at the end of the year? But that three or four clients, did we then add in that four hours of meal planning? And can we reuse that four hours that we've just done? So we're now saving four hours. And how do we equate that on the spreadsheets?
Is it a one off? Will we ever see somebody with IBS again? Will we ever see someone with celiac disease again? We don't know. And then what has changed? What food trends have changed? We've only got to look at The trends that changed coming through those few years that we don't talk about very much anymore, and food changed, lifestyles changed, outlooks changed, and, and in the snap of a finger, those four hours for one patient, five patients a day, 30 a week, how many hours are we losing That we're not financially charging for, but that we are personally paying for in fatigue, in loss of social interaction, all those sorts of things locked in the office.
There's this great personal price that we're paying. By not automating things that we can. Yeah, for me it was time away from my kids and my wife. Here I was, because you, like, again the volume of people that you just spoke about, if you're seeing that amount of people through the week, not every one of them can get a meal plan, that's impossible.
That's huge. And so, yeah. Who are the type of people that participated in the study? Sandi? Yeah, so we, during the study, we didn't drill down on specifics. What we did was we asked if you were a healthcare professional that either was currently using a meal planning platform or had used one in the last three months.
So that was, that's how we defined what a user of a meal planning platform was. And, and then we also asked that if you weren't doing that, if you hadn't used, Get involved anyway, because we want to know why, we want to know is there potential for you to use and what would make you use, what is it as an outsider looking in that you think a meal plan is going to do for you, your business, how useful is it going to be, and what do you think the risks are to using these meal plans.
We've got the for's and against's or the users and the non users is how we termed it within the paper. And look, we, um, We really did get a broad range, I feel, because we put it out to the membership of yours, we put it into LinkedIn, we ran Facebooks, we threw it on the different social pages, and we just really cast the net wide.
We were unique. In that we were asking about the health care professionals perceptions of this. We weren't asking about the outcomes. What do you think your patient outcomes are? What are the patient outcomes? Or have you seen a difference in cardiac risks? By implementing this particular software and we were also different in that we were looking at platforms or software as opposed to apps.
With an app, you've got all that autonomy. It comes on generally on a phone. It's pretty self explanatory and it's all in there and you just go for gold. Whereas with meal planning, there definitely needs to be that driving by the healthcare professional. So it's not something that would be, um, commissioned by a, a client, it would be the facilitator is the healthcare professional and then that gives that ability for the healthcare professional to give that coaching and that guidance and that behavioral, um, reinforcement throughout the, the time that they've got their client with them, which I think is, Really defines the difference between a meal plan software or platform like yours or an app, one where we're tracking.
I think that really was the difference and that's certainly my mind going in and throughout the study was that you really needed to have that opportunity for the healthcare professional to instigate, to drive, to explain and to coach through the reasons why. I think it's probably worth mentioning here too, for anyone that's never created.
They just think it's just throwing meals together, but the problem is, in the back of our mind, we've got the RDIs, the suggested dietary targets, the calorie targets, the macro targets. So all of these things are floating in our mind and we're We've got to somehow merge all these recipes to then go and tickle those boxes.
So it's interesting, like it a hundred percent has to be driven by the health professional and they're the cogs that are turning upstairs. And look, absolutely. And with that new, the new element that. I think most people are now aware of where we're really, as the health care professional, we've got the RDIs, we've got the plate pyramid, whichever country you're in, that's all there, but we now have this new element, and the new element is the environment, and what does that look like when you incorporate.
This is one of those shifts, and when we're looking at no waste, low waste, recycling, and environmental factors, and that, that's truly part of our job when we're doing this. We can't be advising people to, to eat the rainbow when half of the rainbow is non existent, or it's doing dreadful things, or, or we're going to throw away half of the rainbow.
So we've got all these wonderful catchphrases and things that we do because we've always done that. And of course that's another thing that came out in the study, and that is that people who are more likely to take up these technologies are people that are already experiencing the use of technology, but they also need to have that peer group support.
If you've got a new graduate coming into your facility, they're going to be mentored by you and you're not using one of these platforms, then they're less likely to take it on. And that was another finding that we found. And so when we look at those age groups and longevity within the dietetic profession, if we're mentoring from somebody who has a huge amount of practical experience, they've been out and they've been doing this for Quite a long time.
When we look at those changes in the last even 10 years, and when we're looking at longevity within the profession, it could be anything up to 30 years. Think about the changes that have happened. So when we're then mentoring to do what we've always done. We're 30 years behind, or we're 20 years behind, depending on that peerage or support group that's bringing you through and mentoring you.
That definitely was, came up in the research, and of course the other thing that, that came up in other people's research that we were looking at. Is that it also makes quite a difference when the governing bodies get involved for us in Australia. It's the the Australian Dietetics Association and everywhere has their different associations.
If they're not running. Whether it's done in the way of info sessions or CPDs or whatever it is, if they're not running information that gives their, their readership or group that information on how to choose a good platform or how to implement. that in the care plan or it is okay to save some time.
These, this is how you critique a good platform. If they're not doing that, then we're going to continue to burn ourselves out just on this one area of our admin. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's, it's important to get those big bodies on board. What are some of your key takeaways, Sandi? What did you find? Yeah, I think there was some really amazing stuff.
I was quite surprised. When you look at technology, we look at it's there to save time. We definitely saw that. We saw that people that hadn't used a platform expected it to save time, and then those that were using it, it did save time. So, you know, tick tick. We looked at things like demographics, which was Technology is meant to bridge those gaps of people that can't get to.
We're now, we're fast forwarded into the land of technology and communication via technology with telehealth and telemedicine and these sorts of things. So, what surprised me was that. We didn't have too many, and in some cases no, respondents from very remote and very, like, regional areas. And so that really surprised me.
And of course that sort of leads to, what do we do next? And I then, my brain goes to, who's servicing people regionally and remotely? How are these people getting their information and we know that, um, the, the more displaced you are from the city centre, the less resources you have from any, whether it's health or allied health.
And we also know that food scarcity then becomes more of a problem as well in, in the value of the food that we've got and valuing of the food that is available. That was quite interesting to me. Yeah, why do you think that was? I really think, and look, this isn't in the study and it wasn't really much that I've read about, but I travel regionally, have done for many years and very remote areas.
And there's no shingle that says nutrition, dietician, people are just left to their own devices. You need a food service, somebody opens up a family deli and they put in there what the community asks for and then the sales rep comes through and does his job and he gets all this stuff in there and nobody really looks at it and says, what are we doing to our town?
And so then the town turn up in the city for all this chronic illness management, then they get sent straight back to it. But when you look at beyond a placement in your university times, unless it's something that calls to you. We don't really have people working in those areas. So, is it that those areas have not really got on board with technology and telehealth and telemedicine?
So, that would then buy into those people that, you know, maybe another question could have been it. Are you, do you have a client base that is regional or, or remote? Maybe that may have pushed out some different answers, but because this was health, healthcare professional centric and not client centric, that was not there.
The other sort of thing I think is that we're just, we're not as a country, we're really not supporting our regions with allied help. And so, we haven't got people out there doing it, for whatever reason that is. Yeah, I think, from my experience, we had a busy dietitian practice regionally, we go to some rural, I think.
For many businesses, it doesn't just have to be dietetics, but population tends to be where the money is. And so it could be to potentially less disposable money in the business to invest in software. We just haven't taken that leap yet, maybe. Yeah. I was also thinking maybe, I used to spend a lot of my time travelling, is it less time to actually firstly do it, actually go and invest the time in learning a new software maybe, I don't know, but it's interesting isn't it, that a significant amount of the respondents were sort of metro based.
It would be interesting to understand what incentives, there's a lot of small business startup incentives, there's a lot of continuance of business incentives that are available from different areas within government and philanthropy type places, and it would be interesting to know if this, if meal planning platforms Is somehow a subsidiary of one of those, if it's a CapEx, if it's seen as CapEx, or if it's seen as part of the business that could give that bit of a boost for more people to travel regionally to build that rapport, because even though we're still used to, we're now coming into our own with how we operate remotely using Zoom and all these others, Teams is a million.
I just get used to five and another one jumps in. We're getting more used to using this. We've got arguably coverage for our internet and phones. So that's all in place. Is it just that it's easier to do what we've always done, the path of least resistance? And is it that we're not driving these sorts of platforms?
enough, giving people enough information to understand where this does work for them. Look, meal planning, it can be fun if that's what you love doing. It can be an absolute arduous chore if it's not what you enjoy doing. And it can be You know, some people might think it's a time wasting exercise and so they just don't produce it and so if those things are coming into play and you've got to start prioritizing, am I going to drive four hours and see three clients a month, 500 kilometers away?
Or am I going to sit and write a handful of meal plans for the ones that come and see me in my bricks and mortar? And so when you're weighing up those costs of time and money and can I be bothered and whatever other real reasons are there. You really come back to, I'm just going to sit in my bricks and mortar, because this stuff's costing me a fortune each week, and my rent, and my overheads, and But if you were to remove all that, and then that frees you up to travel into these regional areas, and you use the technology, and you use the leave behind information, which is the meal plan, then it's really horses for courses, and, and I think that I see on a lot of the social media people that are living in caravans and they're traveling around and there's always what do you do when you're traveling?
What do you do when you're traveling? So if you're not locked to a bricks and mortar, this is definitely an opportunity for what you can do when you're traveling. Yeah, we're preaching to the converted, but it's like thinking about those hurdles, if you like, that are holding people back. I'm thinking like trying to get into the headspace of when we had our businesses.
You, you, you probably already got a little bit of fear or, not fear, but PTSD thinking about meal plans as it is. And then, like, the bandwidth required to learn anything new can be a problem. And that's certainly one of the issues that we need to address with MEALZEE, is that onboarding. Like, we've got an onboarding process, but people still need to dedicate some time to it.
And so, just making it easier and more seamless for people to get onboard, which it seems like could be one of the barriers for people. And I think onboarding with anything new, you, it's, you, I look, I don't, I never miss one of your podcasts. So I am onboarded by everyone that you've ever spoken to. I'm one of those people that just loves listening to everybody you speak to.
And they've all got fantastic business opportunities to help me. And so I onboard with everybody, but every so often I'll think. Oh, I onboarded and I haven't done anything more with it. And so then I think, Oh, I better go back. Cause this tool was really going to help me. And I was on board and they spent the time and they talked me through it and they really were passionate about their product.
And I could see how it fits in with my business. And yes, it's going to work wonderfully. But then I've gone away and got busy and now I'm ready to revisit it because now it is important to me right now. Before it was important to me because it was new and I wanted to know about it. Now it's important to me because I'm ready to use it.
And so I'm ready for onboarding again in a usable fashion. And I think one of the, one of the things that I feel missing in onboarding is the onboarding walks me through the process. of what the system can do, what the program can do. Yeah. If I had a patient's history or case study that's one of mine, and you said, this is how we're going to implement for this particular client patient, I could walk that right through the processes, and that would make sense to me.
We all learn in different ways. So for me, it's a hands on, and I'm good to go. And I probably only need one or two, and away I go. For other people, it's just walking through that process and they can get through it perfectly. It would be interesting to, to see if that made a difference as well, to not only that initial uptake, because that's always going to be there because we love new things.
We love new shiny things. We want to try everything and we want to support our people. So everybody's going to do that. I don't know anyone that doesn't want to support their mate. We're going to get on board there. But then. What about maintaining that support? What does that look like? Because now we're looking at maintaining that support for my mate.
But what's my payoff? What am I actually, how is that helping my business? How does that fit in with my business now? And how do I incorporate that? Which is where the meal planning, where the research comes in. We all know patient care model. We know it inside and out. We probably sleep and dream it. And we could, we could mix it around and pull it out with our eyes closed.
We know that. What we don't know is that introduction of where does the platform fit in? We know where we're going to hand out our information. We know where we're going to set our goals. We know where we're going to, what are our markers to have the goal shifted? Are we on board? Is it working? Do we need to tweak things?
We move around that process. But where do we facilitate this? And I think if you had a couple of your own case studies sitting there and you just wandered in and you said, show me how it works, I think people could then see how it fits in and how much time it saves and how it's replicable, because that was also something that was found.
If we can replicate things, it's there, we don't have to do it. Think about it too much a second time and we just need to tweak or interchange. And one of the other things that was quite interesting, and I think this comes to our care process. What we do really is we ask our clients to give us a diet recall.
We do that. And then we might ask them, because a diet recall, you think, let's not really mention the rest of the story here. You've given me this wonderful, idyllic type recall, but it's not. fitting the scenario that everything else is saying to me. So tell you what, go away and keep a diet diary for me.
So then we come back with the diet diary, which again is self governed. So, you know, what is that really looking like? But if we were to say to somebody, Okay, keep your meal plan, do that, because we want you to look at your logging and what you're doing and pick up some habits and maybe some emotions and we might put some mood food type things together, we're going to do all of that, but then next week what we're going to do is here's a meal plan.
So what you were doing was great, but here's how we can tweak it, and this is what it looks like. And there's a few extra cooking techniques in here. It's really good of us to say, do you know what, remove all the lard and fat and don't cook in that, and just steam everything. What does that mean to me? I'm fortunate I'm a chef.
If I wasn't that and someone said that to me, I would go home and think, steam what? How do I steam this? I don't even own a steamer. Where do I buy a steamer? What does it look like? What do I, how do I buy a 50 one or a 500 one? What use am I going to get for this? What flavours are it going to make for my food?
We're only telling part of the story and a meal plan. Is an A to Z the whole story? It's going to give you the start and the end. Yeah, I liken it to if you've got a flat tyre in a car, everyone knows that the, you need to change it, but if you've never changed a tyre in a car, ever, and you don't know what you're doing, it can be a bit daunting, so.
That meal plan can be that stepping stone. So from what we've talked about Sandi, and we'll wrap it up with this question if we can, the insights that I'm gleaming from your research is that for health professionals to see this as effective, it's really about saving them time. We need to, obviously this is like things I need to take them with meals, I need to make sure that it's time saving, ease of use.
One thing that we didn't really talk about, and this is different for everyone, but one thing I think about is I've also got to show how this can impact on the health professionals bottom line, their profit, because yes, the software, whichever they choose, is going to have a cost to subscribe to, but how is that going to impact on their business value and generating income?
Did that come up much in the research? Yeah, it did. And so, for those that weren't using the meal planning, they expected that it would save them money. That was their expectation. But then, for them that were using the meal planning, it certainly saved time and it added value to their practice. It added a different dimension to their practice because what it then enabled them to do was it freed up more time to personalise a bit further.
Further. And give that real humanistic personal touch to what they were doing. So I think, um, what comes up in the literature is people think that when we supply a meal plan, we're removing that. Where in actual fact what our users, um, identified through the study was that, you know, we're actually freeing up more time to do that.
There was also a deterrent that was, we threw out there. Would it deter you if you had to give up some other duties that you're doing in practice to learn how to use a meal planning system? And look, it was both ends, both said, yeah, probably, but you know what? People were using it and people on boarded and people were still happy and that payoff.
Was worth it for them. That's what we found in our study. That was definitely in there. They found it non users expected that it would enhance the team. It would make the team more efficient. The people that were using, they said, yep, absolutely. Absolutely. It is absolutely. Making us more efficient as a team.
So, if we're talking about efficiency, we're talking about reducing the time designing meal plans. You, everybody, the non users said, yeah, we expect it to do that. The people using it said, hey, do you know what? It's doing it. So those are aspects that, initially, when you look at onboarding anything. New as a practice, one that wants to do anything new.
It is creating a new habit initially. And like I said before, path of least resistance. If it's creating a new habit, we have to maneuver a little bit initially, but we make it happen. And as as. Healthcare professionals, we all have the things that we need to do throughout the year to stay accredited, to stay involved with our affiliations.
And this would just be no different. There would be no extra time other than that sort of time put aside. I've been walked through three meal plan platforms, and all of them somewhere around the hour of one on one tuition, um, and walked away and could drive these things. I could drive these things enough to be efficient, to make, to make my team work.
I could then feel confident enough to say, Hey, sit down here. I want to show you this new concept, this new thing that we're looking at implementing in the business. I'm going to run you through while it's fresh in my mind. You tell me what you think. I was confident enough after an hour to be able to do that.
There's definitely that initial time input in the study showed that it would reduce take up, but that it hasn't. I think once people step outside what they think and just have a go at Having a play, just have a play with this thing and see what it can, they really see that worth in, in value and what it can bring in the broader concepts of value to themselves and the business in that they can expand the business into new services, they can reduce their hours of working, they've got more life, uh, work balance, uh, in literal hour terms.
And that's what we all want. We, we all want to get that work life balance and that's why one of your previous guests, and certainly I found it in the literature, we're turning out graduates and certainly more and more people that are looking at that slow down from 40 hours a week, dream job, 50, 60 hours a week, that are looking to slow down.
They're going into private practice. If you're in private practice, you're not in private practice to work more hours or work harder or work longer. You're in private practice to slow down and you're in private practice to give that one on one personalized touch to who you're speaking to, that real humanistic approach and that environmental approach.
This is definitely a way of slowing down and still providing. All of that information to your client. It's just understanding where to fit it in and how important it is and that it is. It's not used as a throwaway. It's not used as a have a free pen, thanks for coming, book another 6 weeks. It's not used for that reason.
It's definitely used as a tool. It's used as effectively. If it's understood and explained as we do, that's what we do, that's what we're trained to do is to explain the process and to explain the goal setting and steps to get there. That's what we do. That's the crux of what we do. So a meal plan is just part of that goal setting.
And it is integral to people that are, that need to see a picture, need to read a recipe, need that affirmation that it's okay, you can make a recipe from this, it's going to work, this is what it should look like. Because When you go home and somebody has just said to you I want you to increase your grains by having another three serves a day and I want you to implement some, some fruit because you're not having enough and I want you to have your eight glasses of water and I'll go home and I'll think how do I make this work?
How does this fit into my day? How do I make this work? We've all got these environmental considerations so we've got all this wonderful information. We've got this fantastic healthcare professional who is doing their best to get me to my goal, and they're going to reinforce that each time I speak to them.
But I've just come home and I have no guidance on what to do. So my natural next thing would be to Google. a meal plan. My next best thing would be to open a glossy magazine and there's my seven day meal plan, but I'm seeing a healthcare professional. So then I question, if I'm seeing a healthcare professional, why am I flicking through the glossy magazine looking for my meal plan?
That's one thing we've talked about on here before is that we're in the information, uh, in the business of information as health professionals. We're trying to educate and, you know, upskill our, our clients, but we're at risk of them walking away from those appointments, not feeling a sense of value because you retain whatever it is.
15 percent of what you hear and if they can't remember what we've talked about and yes, we might have given them some nice glossy resources, patient resources and whatever else, they still need a sense of value to walk away with and that's something they're going to use outside of that appointment.
Yeah. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of fears that we found in research that is part of writing our paper and part of understanding where our healthcare professionals were coming from. There was certainly an element of, that if they provided a meal plan, they were downplaying their importance or they were giving into, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't look professional, I should know this.
And, uh, And that's not what meal planning is. Meal planning is not about questioning the integrity or knowledge or experience of the healthcare professional, not in any way. What it is, is it's about giving that client that really good client experience and giving them what they need and to get them to their goal.
A lot of people, this is what they need and this is what a lot of people expect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, Sandi, thank you so much, firstly, for coming on and talking to me, but also, you know, for this field of research, which may not be relevant to many people, but as the owner of Meal Planning Software, it was a space when I went looking, there's not a lot of research, and it's certainly something that can have an impact on people's lives, the public, in terms of being able to, health professionals provide effective, impactful meal plans.
And so, I thank you for everything you've done. Also, you're about to undertake a Masters in Nutrition and Dietetics now, you've, you've gotten into your course and you're about to commence that in 2025. You're also open to any work opportunities because you've had to sacrifice a really good, this is how passionate you are about, um, the, the field of Nutrition and Dietetics is you've sacrificed a great job to then go and, and pursue your passion in this field.
So, if anyone's listening to this and they're looking for someone. Who could do some remote work for them, or if you're in Perth, something local, then please reach out to Sandi. She's on LinkedIn and we'll put all her details in the show notes. Thanks for that, Chris. The research was wonderful. I enjoyed doing it.
Alright, thanks Sandi. Do you find this podcast valuable? There may be other nutrition professionals out there will also. If you like, share and subscribe, it's going to help other nutrition professionals make an impact on the world, just like you. Thanks.
