A clear plan is the backbone of every success story and achieving a fitness goal is no different. The U.P. app helps you plan each step of your journey, to make sure you have a clear strategy to deal with whatever life throws at you.

Key takeaways

• Creating a meal plan for each week gives you a clear structure to follow and allows you to account for potential obstacles in advance.
• Take a “precision mindset” approach when it comes to weighing foods.
• Log your meals using the U.P. app, with thousands of verified entries and suggested portion sizes.

A meal plan is an action plan for how to approach your diet for a specific period, typically one week.

Admittedly, talking about the intricacies of meal planning is not as glamorous as discussing how to optimise your nutrition targets for muscle growth and fat loss, but it is just as important.

Without a meal plan, there are several scenarios that can crop up over the course of a transformation, all of which have the potential to derail your progress. For example, you may find yourself:

• Travelling all day, only able to access airline or service station food.
• Eating in a restaurant with no diet-friendly options.
• Starving hungry and urgently needing to eat something.

These all sound like legitimate excuses for making less-than-optimal diet choices. However, the truth is that any slip-ups these events may cause are completely avoidable with a meal plan.

Travelling with limited access to food becomes a lot easier (and more cost-effective) when you have pre-prepared your meals for the journey.

Likewise, searching for restaurants that you know have healthy options makes dining out a less stressful experience.

A combination of more regular eating patterns and portion control also helps you to better manage your energy and hunger levels throughout the day.

Meal Planning Essentials

Digital food scales

Food scales will help you to hit your nutrition targets with a high degree of accuracy and provide a valuable education in serving sizes.

We recommend digital (rather than old-school analogue) scales for accuracy.

For advice on the kinds of foods you need to weigh, refer to the Serving Size FAQs article.

The U.P. app

The app features an electronic food database and food diary that makes it incredibly easy to set up your meal plan. Specifically, you can use it to:

• View the nutrition values of different foods.
• Understand serving sizes.
• Keep a detailed record of your food intake.

How to Use the U.P. app

Once you have gone through the setup of the app, you will see your daily targets in your dashboard. The set-up will also help you to choose your favourite foods for each meal, to provide you with a full shopping list.

Once you are ready to start logging your food, there are three main ways you can search the U.P. app database.

Where possible, we recommend using the barcode scanning feature.

However, one of the benefits of the U.P. app compared to other market competitors is that our database is not crowdsourced. This means that generic entries in the database provide data that you can rely on.

If you do perform a manual search, you can either search for the generic term or the branded product name. For example, “Sainsbury’s skinless chicken breast”.

If you are eating mainly whole and minimally processed foods, then you should not have to worry too much about database errors.

For advice on how to track foods without nutrition labels, refer to the Serving Size FAQs.