EatThisMuch
EatThisMuch is a well designed and very slick meal planning tool for people who want to lose weight and learn to eat right. With the elimination of “Home Economics” courses and other changes in society since the 50s, many people have forgotten how to cook and what to eat. “Eating” for many families means getting fast food or heating up pre-made meals from the store. EatThisMuch is doing a great job teaching people how to shop, cook, and prepare meals again – its healthier, cheaper, and in many ways, it can be enjoyable.
EatThisMuch vs MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is a fitness tracker. It tracks exercise as well as calories. A calorie tracker is a lot different than a meal planner. In a calorie counting app like MyFitnessPal, you enter foods and quantities and it totals the macros for you. This is awesome if you are a nutritional expert but for everyone else, it just gives them a long, loose shoelace to step on and trip themselves up. Meal planners work on a top down design rather than the bottom up design used by calorie trackers like MyFitnessPal. The other problem with MyFitnessPal is that because it is activity based calorie tracking, it leads to people thinking that because they did a certain amount of exercise that they deserve Y more calories. This kind of mentality virtually always causes fat loss plans to fail. Despite the fact that accounting for every little exercise you do during the day seems like it should allow you to set your calories more accurately, in the real world it does not. This is the reason that serious meal planners only ask for the hours of strenuous exercise per week because this turns out to be more accurate for setting calorie targets.
CustomMealPlanner vs EatThisMuch
EatThisMuch and CustomMealPlanner are quite similar in what they do. They both allow you to choose a nutritional type (vegetarian, vegan, etc) and make a meal plan for the day or week in a single click. They both also allow you to select your meals for the day from a library and generate a shopping list. The difference can be found in the tagline for CustomMealPlanner – “For Serious Fitness”. CMP is aimed at athletes, bodybuilders, and powerlifters who want to maximize muscle gain, strength gain and health. CMP is not nearly as slick as EatThisMuch but provides critical features necessary for athletes. CustomMealPlanner has nutritional types of interest to athletes that are absent at EatThisMuch, for example: low-carb, keto, carb cycling, bulking, and cutting. Even more important is that CustomMealPlanner provides the critical bodyfat charts and weight charts absent in EatThisMuch. Lastly, CMP helps the user make an optimal meal plan for their muscle gain by providing a “Muscle Gain” rating as well as suggestions to improve the meal plan as far as gaining muscle is concerned.
Macros – everyone is an expert
I have been around fitness for over three decades now and I can tell you that one of the biggest hurdles for people is nutrition. The reason its so hard to overcome is that virtually everyone in the gym in convinced that they have “good nutrition” when in fact, its exactly what is holding them back. Many people think that “good nutrition” is simply hitting the magical protein/carb/fat macro percentages that the $97 eBook they bought recommends, its not, its a whole lot more! This is exactly why CustomMealPlanner is so critical for gym goers – because it does not allow you to fall into this nutritional trap. All the free meal plans that CustomMealPlanner provides are optimized for muscle gain, fat loss, and health – it will not allow you to make any mistakes.