#274: Use Meal Plans and Recipes to Grow Your Business (and Stay Within Your Scope)

Michelle:
Hello there, health coaches. I hope everybody's New Year is off to a fantastic start. It was funny the other night we were just with a couple friends for New Year's Eve, just like a quiet, cozy group, and we were playing Cards Against Humanity, watching the ball drop with Seacrest, and I was noticing that that whole Times Square New Year's Eve thing is not what it used to be. If you go back and watch on YouTube like Times Square, new Year's Eve from 1998, it was so much better back then. But that's what we were watching it anyway, even though it was a little bit different than it used to be. And there were all those ads for Planet Fitness this year. They were like the big sponsor. So one of the women that we were with, she kept mentioning her weight and she was insistent that our husband get rid of all the food in the fridge because as of January they had to start eating healthy, which of course is a very common sentiment right about now.

And we all know how quickly that plan will probably fade as it does for most people, unless of course that person is working with you, working with a health coach. So today we're going to talk about how you can help a client like this who really has no idea what to eat or how to stick with it other than just emptying her entire refrigerator today and hoping for the best. How could she actually reach her goals through proper meal planning, finding the right recipes that actually tastes good all while staying within your scope of practice as a health coach. How's that sound? Good? If you're here live, say hello in the comments so that we know that you are watching, you are listening, and please ask questions as we go along. This episode is sponsored by That Clean Life. That Clean Life makes a lot of sense.

If you're spending countless hours creating your own recipes, cookbooks, helping clients meal plan like I used to do back in the day, everything from scratch before this service existed, you are going to love it, especially after you hear in today's episode exactly how to provide meal planning help and recipe collections while staying within your scope of practice. And for a limited time, you can save 20% on your first four months when you join at healthcoachpower.com/tcl (that stands for That Clean Life). Give it a try for a couple of months and I think you'll see for yourself our special guest today is Avita from That Clean Life. Avita, thank you for joining us.

Avita:
Thanks so much for having me, Michelle. It's great to be here.

Michelle:
We were just chatting before we hit record about how I've heard about Avita for years and you were saying the same and we're just finally meeting Face-to-face for the first time. So thrilled to have you.

Avita:
Yeah, I'm so glad to be here and chat everything. Like you said, a lot of clients coming out of that holiday season into the new year, big health goals, big nutrition goals, but they really need that support and actionable guidance in order to achieve them. And that's where you or everyone listening as a health coach, that's where you come in.

Michelle:
Yeah, it's a very exciting time for health coaching. Obviously we all have New Year's goals for business, et cetera, but truly it is like high season for health coaching. So we're like the right topic for the right time of year for sure. Now when we think about meal planning, I know most health coaches go, I'm not allowed to do that. That's outside the scope of my scope of practice. So I just wanted to go at it today head on, because I think meal planning can mean so many different things and there's so many different ways to help your clients with meal plan doesn't necessarily mean here is your Saturday through Sunday calendar with exactly what you're supposed to eat and the exact amount that you're supposed to eat. And here you should follow this prescribed meal plan. What are the other ways that you see health coaches and other nutrition professionals helping with meal planning?

Avita:
Exactly. That's it. When we hear meal plan, there sometimes is knee-jerk reaction. There's a lot of misconceptions about meal plans and nutrition plans where some believe it's too prescriptive, not sustainable, takes too much time, doesn't improve health outcomes. But a meal plan is really just one type of nutrition plan. Like you said, think of a meal plan as a detailed eating plan that outlines daily meals and it includes recipes in an itemized shopping list, but a meal plan isn't the right fit for every client, or maybe it's not within your scope of practice to use a customized meal plan. Or sometimes a client just isn't into following a meal plan they could use instead a collection of recipes. So that's a recipe book or recipe collection that clients can pick and choose from. And another way that you can use meal planning is client led planning.

So this is where you set your clients up with a collection of recipes along with a blank meal plan to guide them through the meal planning process. So I really love this option because it gives clients autonomy, it helps them, teaches them how to do their own meal planning. And really the type of nutrition plan you choose will depend on your client and their unique needs. So certainly in that first assessment or wherever you are with your client, you can ask them what type of plan they would like and then make sure it fits within your scope of practice so that whether that be offering sample meal plans, recipe collections, or teaching your clients how to do their own meal planning.

Michelle:
Yeah, I know that even just looking at a meal plan that's not necessarily meant for that client. In the case of when I've run group programs in my health coaching business, it's not a prescribed, like an individual here eat exactly this kind of meal plan. But it's just like an illustration of, hi, this is what a meal plan can look like. You don't have to cook every day, you can use leftovers. And I've had clients that are like, oh my gosh, is this how you do it? This is it. I can do this. I thought you were going to tell me I had to cook a really fancy dinner every single night. And I'm like, no, dude, this is so simple. So even just like you said, showcasing a sample meal plan can be helpful. Or back in the day when I started health coaching, we would just have a piece of paper, a good and start plugging in ideas the old school way.

So doing it with your clients, the client can say, oh, I think I'd like to have salmon. Cool. They can go off and find a recipe for what they want. You don't necessarily have to do this. It's also a huge time saver. So lots of different ways to think about helping clients with meal planning without actually just handing it to them. Not to mention there's so many services for that. If they wanted to spend, I don't know, a couple bucks a month, they could get generic meal plans sent to them. So why would they hire a health coach to do that? Teach a man to fish, teach a woman to fish and cook her fish. That's what we want to be doing. So for those of you that are here live, is anybody already offering any kind of meal planning service?

Tell me in the comments. Yes, no. Is it something you're thinking about doing, worried about doing? Have you ever offered anything like this before? I've done it so many times. One time, you know what Avita, I did a cook together program, and so I offered a recipe for each day of the week that was clearly going to be optimized for that person's family, if they had kids, how they were going to adapt it for the kids allergies. It wasn't taking, it was not personalized at all, but it was basically like tonight, let's make eggs for breakfast. Tomorrow we're going to have whatever meatballs and everyone would do it differently. So someone would make meatless meatballs and someone would make their grandmother's Italian meatballs. But it was such a fun program just to get people cooking together and talking about their food and what they had substituted in. So I mean, it can actually be a whole program to just say, let's loosely follow these suggestions for dinner each week and have some fun.

Avita:
Yeah, absolutely. And if anyone is, they either are skeptical about offering nutrition planning, meal planning recipe collections in their practice or you've never done it before, sample meal plans and recipe collections and teaching clients how to do their own meal planning, it really works. We've seen health and wellness professionals all over the world do this, and the science shows that nutrition planning can really help individuals choose purchase and prepare healthy snacks and foods on a regular basis. It's shown to improve dietary quality, increase food variety, which is pretty great because like you said, we've all worked with clients who eat the same things all the time. They can't think of anything else to eat, meal planning, nutrition planning, offering those recipe collections. It saves time for your clients, it reduces their stress level. It increases the frequency of family meals, which is so important for social and mental wellbeing and other impacts like reducing food waste, helping clients manage dietary restrictions related to chronic diseases like diabetes. Just offering those sample ideas, offering options, it's just going to get them inspired in the kitchen and be able to stay on track for their health and nutrition goals.

Michelle:
Yeah, I mean I'm kind of like a nerdy meal planner. I just really like doing it. So maybe they will too. You never know.

Avita:
Yeah, exactly.

Michelle:
I think it's really fun. So let's talk about the scope of practice situation. When we think about meal planning in that wider, that broader sense, what do we need to be careful of? And before we even go into this, I just want to say I am not an attorney. Are you an attorney?

Avita:
I'm not an attorney.

Michelle:
Okay. So we're sharing what we've learned best practices from some of the best attorneys out there, right? We just had Lisa Friley on the show a couple weeks ago, and I know that That Clean Life consults with Lisa as well.

Avita:
Absolutely. Understanding your scope of practice as a health coach can be really confusing, especially when it comes to you giving nutrition guidance. So like you said, we sat down with two legal experts to help you get clear on how to use those meal plans and recipe collections to support your clients and grow your health coaching business. So first thing you mentioned, we are not attorneys, so the rules and regulations for health coaches varies from region to region. Because of this, it is imperative for you as a health coach to get familiar with the nutrition and medical laws in your state province and or your country. So connecting with a legal expert who is well-versed in the health coaching space in your area is probably the best way to first and foremost get familiar with these laws. And then in addition to the law, health coaches must also understand and stay within their role as coaches.

So think of your role as a health coach. Your role is to help clients take small sustainable steps to shift behavior and habits, to eat healthfully, to have healthy lifestyle habits and to move towards greater health. So while a health coach can help a client explore the options, they should not be telling the client which options to choose. So that's your second thing to think about. And then the third is health coaches should never diagnose, treat, prevent, cure, or heal any medical disease condition or issue. So these things are considered practicing medicine and are out of the health coach's scope of practice. The focus should not be on the client's disease or medical issue, but rather in helping the client move towards optimal health. So like you mentioned Lisa Fraley, who is an attorney life coach and certified holistic health coach. I know Michelle you had recently had on your podcast, so she likes to use this analogy to better demonstrate the importance of a health coach's role.

She says, if you completely tear your ACL, the personal trainer will help you take a broken knee after it's been surgically repaired by the orthopedic surgeon and restore that knee to its regular function. But when you go to a personal trainer, their job is not to surgically repair their knee. So the same is true for the health coach. The health coach might need to or ask in the initial consultation about any diseases, medical conditions, issues or medication. But then after that everything should be focused on how you move toward optimal health. You really don't need to talk about the disease again because the purpose of the health coach is not to heal or treat the disease. So because health coaches should not give prescriptive medical advice providing nutrition guidance, I can totally understand this can be a tricky situation. So bottom line is generally health coaches should avoid creating personalized meal plans for their clients.

Instead, health coaches can put together a collection of healthy recipes that supports the clients with their health goals. Similarly, health coaches should not be telling clients how much of a particular food to eat or not to eat in a day as this is considered prescriptive. Instead, the health coach should focus on organizing information for their client like recipes and shopping tips so that they can make their own decisions. And some health coaches are able to help their clients do their own meal planning or use sample meal plans. But again, this depends on the laws and the region and where of their health coach is practicing.

Michelle:
Totally. Which is why I love the idea of helping a client learn to meal plan for themselves. It's literally teaching them how to, they've never cooked kale before, great today, this week. Why don't you find a way and cook kale for the first time? I mean this is empowering as opposed to a top-down authoritative approach of like, I want you to make this food and eat this much. So not helpful in the long run anyway. So very cool. And now, I mean in the old days I would get off the phone with the client and maybe the client told me that they were going to try kale for the first time they were branching out into new territory. They knew it was going to be a healthy thing to do, they'd never done it before. And I would go hunting around online looking for, gosh, even back then, maybe even my cookbooks on the shelf trying to find three or four different recipes that they could use or use for inspiration.

And I would email it to them and say, oh, here's some ideas to help you with the kale this week. But if a client had, I don't know, an allergy or they were celiac or whatever, I had to find very specific recipes and they're avoiding dairy, but they're also avoiding nuts. And I'd be like trying to find, it could take a really, really long time, but it's almost like with supplements, you guys, we can never be like, take this vitamin D supplement. But you can be like, here are a couple to choose from. Here are a couple for you to look at and get ideas from. So I love the idea of recipe collections because I've had clients that were like, I eat the same thing for breakfast every day and it is a bagel and cream cheese and I cannot imagine any other breakfast that is fast enough for me to eat. And I would be like, here are 50 ideas.

Avita:
You take all the foods that they love, you take the foods that they can eat, whether that's having dietary restrictions, what food is accessible to them, what food does their family eat, and using that life makes it so simple to create those recipe collections. Then because we have over a hundred ways to filter recipes, you can filter by time, number of ingredients, dietary tags, cultural tags. So if you've got a client who's following African inspired recipes or Mediterranean or Indian or Trinidadian, you can find those recipes all within that theme life and it's really easy to filter through and find exactly what you need or if you have to filter by nutrition information, super easy. So gone of those days, like myself too when I was practicing in the hospital and looking for recipes or meal plans and creating these types of resources for clients took me hours and now acting like you can redo that within minutes.

Michelle:
I love it. And they love getting these resources too. It feels like such a value add, which I feel like health coaches are often health coaches. What is it like health coaching? It's ethereal. It's just like a nebulous thing. It's conversation. It's like you can't hold it in your hand, but you can hold a recipe collection in your hand or at least you can open it up like a PDF on your computer. So I think it adds a tangible value that clients love and healthcare love to feel like we're providing a tangible value.

Avita:
If you tell your clients to eat more kale, it's super hard to be like, here you go, eat more vegetables, eat more kale. And they're like, okay, but how do I actually cook kale? How do I use kale in different ways? How do I add this to my diet throughout the week? Just give them a recipe collection of different ways to do that. Air fryer, slow cooker, pressure cooker, fry it, eat it plain in a salad, give them ideas, get them again inspired and feeling good in the kitchen because I feel like 2024 should be the year of less food fear, more food enjoyment and more time in the kitchen. And so recipe collection, sample meal plans, this is a great way to help your clients get to that place.

Michelle:
Okay, secret. I don't run health coaching program group programs anymore myself, but I had run them in the past where there were some banging recipes that I got from That Clean Life and just in my own kitchen, I'll be like, oh, I got to make that lentil masala again. And I go dig up my own materials from years ago. And I mean some of recipes are really, they're very good. And I have clients who do the same thing for many years ago. They're like, I still have those recipe books. We still use your recipes. And I'm like, thank you, thank you. My recipes.

Avita:
Yeah.

Michelle:
Just in case anyone's unclear the recipes that you get from That Clean Life while they're not exactly yours, you are allowed to use them and republish them unlike stuff that you get online.

Avita:
Yes, so much yes. So with That Clean Life, we have over 5,900 recipes currently and we add 30 to 40 recipes every week. So this recipe database is constantly growing. All of our recipes are made in-House by our recipe developers. So rest assured, these are recipes that your family is going to love because they're tried and tested in family kitchens. And when you send these recipes to your clients, whether you're sending it through a shared link or exporting as a PDF, it is fully branded to your business and to your name. So it does not mention That Clean Life. So these are now your recipes that your clients are going to love and they're going to thank you for and that you're delivering this professionally branded resource to them that they're going to love it, but they're also going to take your business very seriously and they're going to see the amount of work that you've put into their resources when you actually just took a couple of minutes to create this, but it's still beautiful and it looks good, it looks exciting, it looks delicious. So they're going to follow through with your recommendations as well.

Michelle:
Yeah, I just like to point that out because when we're talking about scope of practice, that's one legal issue, but then there's this whole other legal issue when it comes to recipes, which is like, I didn't know this in my first year, maybe two of health coaching. You can't just copy and paste somebody else's recipe and sell it or put it into something for your own business. That's copyrighted stuff. So very useful resource in that regard. Let's talk about some fun ways that health coaches can use different nutrition planning, meal planning, recipe collections in their practice more than just like, oh, hi, I have a private client who wants meal ideas. How else do you see practitioners growing their practice using these tools?

Avita:
Yeah, absolutely. So building your audience, I'm sure that's everyone's New Year's goal, attracting more clients, growing your business, everybody wants to do that. And building your audience is really critical because it ensures you've always got this set of engaged potential clients willing to share you out, engage with your business without an audience really like getting your leads and sales virtually impossible. On the other hand, when you have this list of leads, selling your programs and services becomes a lot easier. So an excellent way to do this is using recipe collections as a way to attract your ideal collections as a lead magnet. So one of our vaccine life members and health coach Stephanie Mae Potter, she does an excellent job at this. She puts together recipe collections that speak to her client's main pain points. So what your clients really are struggling with, she then creates a landing page and then promotes this freebie as a way to grow her list.

So clients go to her, whether it's social media or website, they see exactly this lead magnet, this freebie offer that addresses what they're struggling with and they want to sign up. So once they sign up to get that freebie, they are now on her mailing list and she can continue to nourish these leads in the hopes that they eventually become paying clients. And aside from those, aside from using That Clean Life for lead magnets, she also uses That Clean Life to generate resources for something like you mentioned Michelle, which is group nutrition programs and other things. You can use it for free challenges. She uses it for her quarterly detox challenge and she uses the filters inside of That Clean Life to find recipes that work for her clients, her participants. And then she puts these recipes into a collection or a sample meal plan, and Stephanie finds that when her clients and her program participants have the right recipes, they are much more likely to be successful. So again, she doesn't have to take hours. It's not a time consuming process That Clean Life helps her do it within minutes.

Michelle:
I love that. And what you said was so important, I'm going to echo it for everybody. She makes these recipe collections based around a client…

Avita:
Pain point.

Michelle:
So it's not here are 20 smoothie recipes.

Avita:
Yes, so much.

Michelle:
It would be like, here are 20 thyroid supportive smoothie recipes or...

Avita:
Yes.

Michelle:
Smoothie, and I'm just using smoothie recipes as an example, but like smoothie recipes for busy, exhausted moms so that ...

Avita:
It could be based on...

Michelle:
How the food helps.

Avita:
Based on your niche or your niche, however you pronounce it, but also time of the year. And your lead magnet does not have to be stagnant. It's not something you have to use throughout the year. You can switch it up every couple of months. So for New Year's you could say, yeah, we just released at That Clean Life or four week real food meal prep challenge. And so getting some sort of freebie out there that's inspiring clients to sign up in the moment, whether it's around St Patrick's Day, maybe you want to offer 30 or 20 green smoothie recipes for St. Patrick's Day that are low glycemic and high in fiber or whatever it might be. So you want to target your niche niche, your ideal audience, those main pain points as well as maybe seasonal or what's going on in your ideal client's lives at the moment.

Michelle:
Right? So think about that real hard. I could say it a million times and I have to say 1,000,001 times after I see health coach come out with their look what I made, and again, it'll be like 20 smoothie recipes. So please rewind everyone and listen to that again and think about what is the problem that this type of food, whatever it is, these soups, these stews, these desserts, whatever, can help somebody solve because that's how you're going to attract people who have a problem to solve. Otherwise, you're just giving recipes to people who like recipes. They're not going to hire a health coach because they like recipes. They're going to hire a health coach. They have a problem. So that's just like a strategic thing that's going to help you go from like, oh, I'm making these free things and I'm building a list, but I'm not signing clients to, okay, now I'm attracting people who actually need the help and are going to hire me. So super important, thank you for bringing that up. Obviously programs, we've got our five date jumpstarters right now doing this type of thing for their own five day programs, sample meal planning, or here's a collection of recipes that you can use that all fit what we're doing during this five day. I love that. Tell me your ideas on generating passive income or maybe recurring income with these types of resources.

Avita:
Yeah, I personally love using recipe collection sample meal plans for passive and recurring income. So some of the ways you could do this is setting up a section on your website that contains self-help resources, so clients can just help themselves with what they need. I'm based in Calgary, Alberta, and Canada, so I'll give a shout out to my fellow Cal and nutrition expert, Andrea Hardy. She's a great example of someone who does this really well. So Andrea has a section she specializes in IBS and sample plans play a key role in her services. So she has a section on her website called Self-Help resources, which includes many meal plans, like a four week low FODMAP elimination phase meal plan with a grocery list. And what she does is this is a great way for clients to help themselves to what they need. And for Andrea, this section of her website generates passive income.

She set it up in a way that clients can refer to it over and over again without putting in more work. And That Clean Life makes it easy for Andrea to put together these resources as we've got filters for specific diets, like a low FODMAP filter so she can easily and quickly generate these meal plans and recipe collections. And when it comes to generating recurring revenue, I recently spoke to one of our members, Alex Turov, so she's got this system really figured out. She meal plans pay again a key role in the success of this service. So after clients have gone through her one-on-one coaching program, they're invited to a membership service called the Alumni program, which allows participants to get continued access to sample meal plans, recipe collections, and group coaching calls. So this is a great way to keep up the momentum they've built after working with her one-on-one, the more clients who joined this program, the more Alex's recurring revenue really grows.

And Alex actually has clients who have been in this membership program for two to three years. That's pretty wild for recurring revenue. She just sets up these sample meal plans and recipe collections and clients just want that continued support. And so they'll stay in that membership service. It's a lower cost program, it just has a monthly fee, and so you can use it for recurring revenue or you can use meal plans, recipe collections, and that can buy for recurring revenue, passive income generating leads, and then again, group programs supporting your clients. One-on-one like Leanne Dawson empowers our clients to do their own meal planning. What she does is she provides her clients with a sample meal plan, shows them how meal plan could look, and then a collection of recipes so that they could build out their own meal plans. And again, supporting one-on clients doesn't need to be with sample plans.
It can just be with recipe books. So Health Coach Sheree Jenkins likes to take the guesswork out of mealtime for her clients. So she does is focusing on what her clients can add and offers recipe books to meet those needs. For example, if they want to eat more vegetables, she provides a recipe collection with fun ways to incorporate more vegetables. So again, it can be totally dependent on your client goats, but make it simple, make it easy and make it based on what they're interested in. We've also seen coaches use meal plans and recipe collections to offer high quality corporate wellness services, run nutrition challenges and host cooking classes and workshops. Really, the ways that you can use meal planning and nutrition planning in your practice are endless and really dependent on what your strengths are and what you want to offer in your services.

Michelle:
Again, I'm no lawyer, but I like that idea of having something that someone can just purchase because then it very clearly was not made for them at all, not individualized, and they know it because they probably never even talked to you. They just bought something off your website or whatever. That to me sounds like a pretty safe way to go. And I agree with you. I'm sure anybody listening who's worked with any clients has seen this, clients tend to want us to tell them what to eat. They want meal plans. They are expecting that because that's pretty much all they've ever seen in the nutrition world is being told what to eat. So they will ask for this. And it can be tricky to say, oh no, I'm not allowed to do that. Like, oh, I can really feel disempowering and make it sound like maybe they should hire somebody else who can.

I want you to turn that around and really empower yourself, empower your client. This is a positive because when you're talking to your client, your prospective client, you're not going to say, oh, I can't do that. Oh, I don't have enough certifications to do that. I am less than. No, no, no, no. Throw all that language out the window. Instead, you can frame it like, yes, it definitely helps to have a plan to follow, but only your likes and your dislikes and your family preferences and your schedule and how much time you have to cook and they're going to go. So as your health coach, I'm going to help make sure that not only do you have meal plans and great recipes, but that you know how to do it yourself really easily. And they're going to be like, oh, awesome. Because every time I get a stupid meal plan online, it never quite fits my needs anyway. You're going to show me how to do it. That's perfect. So now it feels like a plus instead of a minus. And that is how you position yourself as a partner with a client, not that top down authority figure. When people go on their New Year's Resolution diet, we know most of 'em are going to end up gaining weight in the long run. So this is how we can partner with them to change that statistic over time. Wouldn't you agree, Avita?

Avita:
I love that. And there's so many different ways you can do it. We have some practitioners who offer recipe collections, set it up as a program. So start with the meal. They struggle with the most recipes for dinners, getting 20 minute healthy dinners on the family friendly dinners on the table for first couple of weeks, then move on to breakfast, then move on to lunches, and then they've got a huge recipe collection or several collections with their blank plan, and then they can start doing their own meal planning. You could do a whole program on this, whether it's a group program or a one-on-one program, and really keep your clients engaged, and they're going to love these continuous resources coming to them to actually stick to their goals for 2024.

Michelle:
So I would say y'all just have to figure out how to incorporate meal planning and recipes into your practice. It's not really an if thing because we know they want it. So it's just how's it going to work for you best? And there's lots of places to get recipes online obviously, but if you want the convenience and the ease of using That Clean Life, then make sure you take us up on the discount that we have for you. I want to remind you what that is. It's 20% off your first four months when you join That Clean Life at healthcoachpower.com/tcl. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Avita:
It was lovely. Thank you so much. And if you have any questions, you can always reach out to us at hello@thatcleanlife.com or visit our website, and we'd love to hear from you.

Michelle:
Amazing. And this episode is also brought to you by Practice Better, the practice management software we love, which actually integrates with That Clean Life. So everything your client needs comes to them in one tidy bundle Practice Better handles everything. It's like your billing, it's your scheduling, it's your forms, it's your programs, it's your meal plans, and so much more. So for a limited time, you can get a bonus kitchen clean out program built right into the practice, better platform to use with your clients and start earning with right away. Plus, you will get 30% off your first three months when you go to healthcoachpower.com/pb to get started. And all the details will be in the show notes, and I'll see you all next week. Take care everyone. Bye-Bye.