How to Create a Meal Plan for Clients: A Step-by-Step Guide for Coaches

Most coaches don't struggle with knowing what a client should eat. They struggle with turning that knowledge into a plan, for every client, every few weeks, without losing a whole Sunday to it. The fix is a process you can repeat: the same steps, in the same order, every time.

This guide walks through that process, from the first intake form to the first adjustment. It works whether you build plans in a spreadsheet, a document or dedicated software.

Before you start: rules about who may write meal plans differ by country and state. In many places coaches and trainers can give general healthy-eating guidance to healthy adults, while medical nutrition therapy is reserved for registered dietitians. Check what applies to you, and refer clients with medical conditions, eating disorders or pregnancy to a qualified professional.

Step 1: Start with a proper intake

A meal plan is only as good as what you know about the person following it. Before you calculate anything, collect:

• Goal and timeline: fat loss, muscle gain, performance or simply eating better, and by when.
• Body data: age, sex, height, current weight and, if you track it, waist measurement.
• Training: how many days a week, what kind, and at what time of day.
• Daily routine: work hours, when they wake up and go to bed, when they actually get hungry.
• Food preferences: foods they love, foods they won't touch, allergies and intolerances, cultural or religious requirements.
• Practical limits: cooking skill, time available, budget, and whether they cook for a family.
• Current eating: a three-day food log is the single most useful thing you can ask for. It shows you what "normal" looks like for them.

Put this into a standard form so every client answers the same questions. It saves you follow-up messages and makes the next steps faster.

Step 2: Set calorie and macro targets

Next, turn the intake into numbers. The usual approach:

1. Estimate basal metabolic rate (BMR) with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation.
2. Multiply by an activity factor to estimate maintenance calories (TDEE).
3. Adjust for the goal: typically a 10–20% deficit for fat loss or a 5–10% surplus for muscle gain.
4. Set protein per kilogram of body weight (1.6–2.2 g/kg is common for people who strength train), fat at 20–35% of calories, and let carbohydrates fill the rest.

We cover every step, with a worked example, in How to Calculate Macros for Clients. If you just want the numbers, our free macro calculator does the math in seconds.

Remember that these are estimates. Their job is to give you a sensible starting point, not a final answer. The real calibration happens in step 8.

Step 3: Choose a meal structure

Decide how many times a day the client will eat before you pick a single food. Base it on their routine, not on a rule you read somewhere:

• Three meals and one or two snacks suits most people with a regular schedule.
• Shift workers and parents of young children often do better with fewer, larger meals they can rely on.
• Place a meal or snack with carbs and protein within a few hours before and after training if it fits their day.

Then split the daily targets across those meals. Spreading protein fairly evenly, roughly 20–40 g per meal for most adults, is a simple rule that also helps with fullness.

Step 4: Build meals from foods the client already eats

The fastest way to lose a client is to hand them a plan full of foods they've never bought. Start from their food log and their preferences:

• Keep the meals they already like and adjust portions to fit the targets.
• Change one or two meals at a time rather than all of them.
• Use foods that are easy to find where they live. A product from a US supermarket is no use to a client in Australia.

Variety matters less than you'd think. Two or three breakfast options and a handful of lunches and dinners on rotation is easier to shop for and easier to stick to than 21 different recipes a week.

Step 5: Hit the numbers without obsessing

Real food never lands exactly on a target, and it doesn't have to. Reasonable tolerances:

• Calories within about 5% of the target for the day.
• Protein within about 10 g of the target.
• Carbs and fat flexible, as long as calories and protein are on track.

Beyond the macros, sanity-check the plan as a whole: enough vegetables and fruit, enough fiber, mostly minimally processed foods, and enough water. A plan that hits the macros with protein bars and diet soda isn't a good plan.

Step 6: Plan training days and rest days

Decide whether the client eats the same on every day or slightly less on rest days. For beginners, the same targets every day are usually the simplest. For more experienced clients, trimming 10–20% of calories from carbs on rest days is a popular option. We explain the trade-offs in Rest Day Macros: Should Clients Eat Less on Rest Days?

Step 7: Deliver the plan in a format they'll actually open

A beautifully built plan doesn't help if it's buried in an email attachment. Clients check their plan at the supermarket, at work and in the kitchen, so it needs to work on a phone:

• One link they can save to their home screen beats a PDF they have to search for.
• Show each day clearly, with meals, portions and the day's totals.
• Mark rest days so the client knows why the numbers differ.
• Include simple swaps, such as "chicken or turkey", so a missing ingredient doesn't derail the day.

Step 8: Review and adjust

Ask the client to follow the plan for two to three weeks before you change the numbers. Then look at:

• Adherence: how many days did they actually follow the plan? If it's fewer than most, fix the plan before you touch the calories.
• Body weight trend: use a weekly average of daily weigh-ins rather than single readings.
• Hunger, energy, sleep and training performance.

If adherence is good and progress has stalled, adjust calories by about 100–200 kcal a day, usually by changing carbs or fat while keeping protein steady.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Building the plan around the coach's favorite foods instead of the client's.
• Too many different recipes in the first plan.
• Changing the numbers every week instead of giving the plan time to work.
• Ignoring weekends, eating out and social events.
• Sending the plan as a file the client never opens again.

Make the process repeatable

The steps above don't change from client to client, which means most of the work can be reused. Keep a library of recipes with the macros already worked out, keep a few starting templates by calorie range, and reuse whole days when a client is happy with them.

That's the workflow SendFit is built around: targets per plan, a recipe vault that starts with 1,000 recipes, ready-made 7-day plans at 1,600, 2,000 and 2,500 kcal to start from, macros that add up as you build, and one branded link your client opens on their phone. If you coach their training too, the day's workout sits on that same link, right next to the day's meals.