This is *finally* a proper announcement about what is soon to be changing with Heart of Cooking and the Nourishing Foods Menu Planners for limited diets and multiple food allergies! I will list the upcoming changes down below, but I will first give you a little background…
2008
When I started creating weekly menu planners for people with food allergies in November of 2008, I quickly learned that making meal plans for people on limited diets is tricky and complex! This is mostly due to the fact that people’s allergy lists are always slightly different. Add in likes/dislikes as well as vegetarian verses meat eater diets and you get a whole slew of variations of menu plans!
2009
I started to solve this problem in the Spring of 2009 by creating menu planners specifically for certain allergens such as dairy, gluten, soy and nightshade vegetables. I also included substitution sections where people could reference different foods they could use to replace ingredients in a recipe.
When I discovered the GAPS diet, SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet) and the Paleo diet, I created menu planners for these specific diets as well. It’s been great – people have received what they need to a certain extent and I am grateful as my business has grown.
2010
But it hasn’t been enough! People continually email me and tell me about their long list of foods they have to avoid. The main problem is I haven’t been able to keep up the requests of creating new menu planners. Lots of people have been requesting completely vegan or vegetarian menus as well as other specific diet menu planners such as a Candida diet menu planner. Furthermore, people want plans that include breakfasts, lunches and snacks.
So, I decided it was time to go onto my next step of creating a membership site for people with multiple food allergies and limited diets. The original idea for this came from doing research online for other menu planning services. The menu planning sites that appealed to me the most were the ones that allowed their members to change recipes within a menu planner or create a custom meal plan for the week. Also, the shopping list would be updated if someone changed a recipe.
This format seemed to be the solution for creating menu planners for people with specific diets and multiple food allergies because people could change recipes in the plans very easily.
