Overview

Welcome to Fitness Blender's new Strength Building Meal Plan! This 1-week plan features whole food recipes that are nutrient dense and high in protein to support your body through strength training. It was developed by Registered Dietitians and Recipe Developers to provide recipes that are easy to use and tailored to busy people. 

Our goal is to teach you how to craft meals in a healthy, enjoyable, and optimal way.  

No matter what your goals are, this plan has been built so that it can easily be customized to meet your needs to lose weight, gain weight, or maintain your weight — and at the same time, build a foundation of healthy eating practices and ideas. 

Below is an overview of both the meal plan and a guide of nutrition and food science. 

What's Included in This Meal Plan

• This meal plan includes 7 days of meals and snacks. It's scaled to your nutritional needs, calorie needs, and needed number of servings. 

• We include a grocery list that corresponds to your unique meal plan. This will include all ingredients to the recipes and snacks incorporated in this meal plan. 

• Linked articles, resources, and infographics planned into each day for educational resources.

• This plan is linked to your FB calendar so that you can check off meals, snacks, and write notes or observations each day. 

• Meal Plan User Guide with chapters on everything from proper hydration to the psychology of food, choosing the right workouts to healthy grocery shopping. 

• Recipes that are FLAVORFUL, HEALTHY, EASY TO MAKE!

Our Nutrition and Food Philosophy

1. Eat Real, Whole Foods: Eat foods that are as close to their natural form and that have been processed or refined as little as possible and are free from additives or other artificial substances. Limit processed and packaged foods with a focus on foods that are fresh and close to their original form in nature. 
2. Balanced Nutrition and Exercise: We believe in balance when it comes to nutrition and working out. You don't have to be perfect all of the time; you just need to learn to do your best, most of the time! Aiming for perfection is a great way to sabotage yourself. 
3. Balanced Nutrition: This meal plan operates under the principle of teaching you how to eat nutritionally  — giving you insight into a balanced breakdown of carbohydrate, fat, and protein, as well as what portion sizes might look like when you are trying to reach or manage your bodyweight goals. Eating nutritionally is not separate from being able to listen to what our body’s telling us, rather, this is in combination with growing an awareness of our bodies' internal cues.
4. Mindful Eating: We have created this meal plan to not only be a nutritionally-balanced program, but also one that teaches you to become more aware of internal cues of hunger, fullness, and cravings. 
5. Keeping Things Simple and Sustainable: There are a lot of different ideas out there when it comes to nutrition, but we think ours is one of the simplest and most sustainable. 

Learning to Eat Well for the Rest of Your Life

Our goal is for you to learn how to eat well for the rest of your life — this is not a diet, but a lifestyle. Think of this meal plan as a general guideline and idea-generating tool for you to use. 

We want this meal plan to help you learn how to meet your nutritional needs with real food — not with meal replacement shakes, powders, or supplements. This meal plan has been built in conjunction with registered dietitians and is based largely off of the kinds of foods that we regularly include in our own personal diets. We believe in eating real, whole foods as often as possible, in order to create a diet that is nutrient dense, filling, and fully capable of supporting an active lifestyle.

Whether you are brand new to the concept of healthy eating, or you feel like you are a veteran at making smart food choices, there is a lot to be learned from following this meal plan (after gaining express approval from your personal health care physician, of course).