The Blurb:
Jane Plan delivers delicious, nutritious food in a plan put together by your own nutritionist. The diet is varied, simple to follow, and easy to stick to.
The Process:
After a thorough and detailed discussion, Jane, or one of her handpicked nutritionists, creates a comprehensive and bespoke diet plan, taking into account your weight-loss goals, likes, dislikes, intolerances, allergies, and preferences for higher carb or protein diets.
Jane is equal parts warm, knowledgeable and efficient. Holding your hand throughout, she calls weekly to raise your morale and refresh you on coping strategies when your resolve is flagging or you’re eating out. Although to be honest, the plan is so easy to follow and the food so tasty, this is hardly necessary.
After discussing your palette and the dishes that appeal, Jane puts together a personalised plan from their wide menu and then has everything you need delivered all at once. The meals are vacuum-sealed as soon as they’re cooked, so stay fresh for a very long time, and all you need to buy is fresh fruit and veg to accompany. Incidentally, the Jane Plan packaging is very attractive, looks nice in your kitchen and helps the whole process feel more pleasant. My friend noticed a box of food in my kitchen and without knowing it was a diet plan, commented on how attractive the branding was.
The food arrived with a welcome pack, step-by-step plan, current and target weight charts and a very thorough booklet of tips. Most of this will have been discussed at the beginning of your plan, but there is also some really sound advice beyond an obvious common sense approach. There are daily charts for you to note down everything that passed your lips and fill in everything from how you felt to whether and how you exercised. This awareness around food is really what Jane Plan’s all about. Jane encourages people to re-frame their thinking around food and reprogram their body and portion control. This approach continues until they’re ready to eat unsupervised, and keep the weight off with a newly developed, healthier approach to nutrition and portion size.
The dinners are the real high point; out of around thirty options my favourites were the pork meatballs, chicken with coconut milk, turmeric and ginger, and the chicken cooked in rosemary with potatoes.
The lunches were much lighter, many of them soups. I personally struggled with the soups as they are extremely low calorie. I brought this up in one of Jane’s calls and she adapted the lunches to include more of the pasta salads, which were wonderful. If, like me, you feel nauseous and shaky on a low-calorie diet I’d steer clear of the soups and advise the three-bean salad, wild salmon and vegetable salad, tuna pasta salad, and Mediterranean tuna salad, amongst others.
Jane Plan’s breakfasts are a selection of different muesli (gluten-free versions available), granola or porridge. The most appealing was the organic muesli with goji berries and pineapple. However, I always start my day with two poached eggs on wilted spinach; on discussing my current diet with Jane, she suggested I continue with this and only implement the plan from the mid-morning snack onwards. Her breakfasts are much healthier than standard cereal, and great if you’re pushed for time, but I personally rather enjoy my morning poaching and cooking ritual so I happily stuck with it.
Last but not least, the plan is democratically priced. At £240 for a month’s food it’s pitched at an extremely competitive and affordable price point.
The Result:
Fantastic. I followed the plan for three weeks in the lead-up to Christmas, and was delighted to slip back into my cocktail dresses come party season. Average weight loss on the plan is two–three lbs per week, which is pretty much as effective as a diet can be without being unhealthy or encouraging the body to go into starvation mode, clinging onto the very fat you’re trying to shed.
The plan is perfect post-Christmas to slough off any rounded edges brought on by the festive excesses; and also pre-summer instead of following an ineffective and panicked last-minute bikini diet.
