This is my second time using Real Plans. I found the Low FODMAP plan a couple years ago when I was having health issues and the app was a lifesaver- it saved me from having to spend hours researching recipes and ingredients. I had a week’s worth of meals in a few moments. I actually saw my symptoms improve by following the meal plan! Unfortunately I started having health issues again so I turned to the app for support. I created the meal plan and used the grocery list to do all my shopping. So easy! But the next day (a Sunday) I discovered all the recipes I had planned for had disappeared! I realized a new week had populated and I could not find the week I had planned for. Upset, I emailed customer service and complained, not expecting a reply til the next day at the earliest. I was so surprised that within an hour of my email I had a call back from a real person! Antony understood my frustration and patiently walked me through finding the week of meals I had planned for. I am definitely glad I renewed my subscription and am truly grateful for the support!

I’m doing the whole 30 minus nightshades and I can choose from easy to budget to more complicated meals. The shopping and pantry lists are awesome. Right now I’m cooking four days a week and using leftovers for the rest of the days. Although this next week, I’m cooking a little bit longer. Sometimes meal prep like this morning took two hours for breakfast for 5 days. It wasn’t difficult, there is just a lot of fresh herbs that I had to take off the stems. It takes a long time. I feel better and I’m losing weight. And it’s good to know that after I cook lunch with enough leftover for the rest of the week and then dinner with enough leftover for the rest of the week, my work week is gonna be so much easier. But yes, I do spend most of all day Sunday cleaning, cooking, cleaning cooking, cleaning, cooking … it is definitely not a lazy day. But I do get to rest in between. Yesterday at the farmers market was fun, but sometimes I’ll just go to Winco or Chuck’s to get some of the fruits and veggies. My blood sugar is down my resting heart rate is down. My walking Heart rate is down and my blood pressure is down. I know what I’m putting in my food.

I’ll preface this with, I came from the major meal planner service, which has a ton of developers and recipe makers, tons of recipe options, easy to use app. The drawback was that there wasn’t an option to do AIP or at least remove nightshades, which is an allergen in our household, and 90% of their recipes contain and NEED tomatoes. Being on this allergy trip for a few years, I do have a few swaps up my sleeves (pumpkin purée takes on the flavor of tomato sauce, fyi), but I was getting tired of constantly omitting the tomatoes. So I decided to try real plans. I liked the idea of it, i loved that I can dial in our allergens. There’s a huge list in the settings that I can select or deselect to get the curated foods set directly onto the weekly meal planner. My major major dislike is that the recipes are now repeating, less than a month later, there’s not really much to choose from in general, so there’s not a lot of recipes I can swap in now that we’ve seen a lot of the recipes. And while the kids enjoyed almost all of the recipes from the other service even with me swapping ingredients out, they have been less than enthusiastic about each meal with Real Plans. We’ve only favorited two meals this month out of many. The idea behind this app and planning service is fabulous but the execution and the options just isn’t there, and I wouldn’t have paid as much as I did to sign up had I known.