How My Plate Coach app works
The My Plate Coach is based on a few very simple principles:
- Eat protein at every meal and snack
- At main meals: half of your plate should be made up of vegetables, 25% of protein, and 25% of carbohydrate
- Eat regularly, never missing a meal, and have three healthy snacks a day
- Drink water or skimmed milk with every meal and snack
Making it easy to apply the balanced plate method to your eating.
Stick to a rhythm
Using the SHYE Coach app means you get reminders to eat regularly. You also get reminded to photograph each meal and snack so you can get an assessment of what you eat. Using the dividers you work out what portion of your plate is vegetables or fruit, protein or carbs. The app awards your plate little hearts – pink, yellow or green – according to how healthy your plate of food is – and five green hearts is the optimum. Not getting enough hearts? You can click on the information button to see how you can improve. At a glance you can see how you eat over a 24-hour period and make a note of how you feel after meals – energetic or tired, satisfied or craving unhealthy foods, etc – so you know where you’re going wrong.
High energy
Keeping your energy levels up is an essential part of the My Plate Coach (SHYE Coach) approach, as you’re far less likely to eat unhealthy foods. So a sugary doughnut or a handful of biscuits may give you a sugar boost mid-afternoon, but it won’t satisfy you until dinner time and will leave you feeling tired and grumpy – and craving the wrong foods. But a healthy snack that includes some protein – say, oatcakes with cottage cheese and an apple – will satisfy you for longer and keep your energy levels up. Keeping them up over the long-term means of losing weight.
In this way, you don’t have to deny yourself the occasional unhealthy treat, like chocolate, as long as you only have a small amount and eat healthily the rest of the time. We follow the 80:20 principle – if you eat very healthily 80% of the time, you can be less restrictive in your diet for 20% of it – and still lose weight.
Picture this
Many people complain that diets don’t work for them, and that eating healthily is really hard to stick to. What’s really clever about the My Plate Coach is the way it keeps you on-track without making you feel guilty or miserable. Studies have found* that photographing your plate of food just before you eat it naturally induces you to eat more healthily, and to eat smaller amounts. So picturing every meal – in effect, keeping a picture food diary – means that you can’t kid yourself about what you actually eat and drink. You are constantly aware of your food intake, and this makes your food choices become healthier when shopping or cooking.
No hunger pangs
What surprises people when they use the My Plate Coach app (SHYE Coach) is the fact that they’re not eating less food in order to lose weight – they’re in fact eating more. Eating three meals and three snacks a day, at regular intervals, keeps your digestive system active – which means your metabolism is burning energy instead of storing it as fat. So when you use the See How You Eat Coach app you’re never starving hungry and craving bad foods! An essential part of this is eating protein at every meal and snack, as this keeps you satisfied for longer. No more eating sparingly all day then feasting in the evening. No more having tiny salads for lunch in an attempt to lose weight, then bingeing on chocolate bars on your way home because your brain and stomach are crying out for food. Your appetite is regulated, so you eat regularly and healthily.
A weight loss success
Many My Plate Coach app users in Finland have found that – for the first time ever – they can lose weight and keep it off for good. Instead of feeling all that negativity normally associated with healthy eating, and all that self-sabotaging guilt, they find it easy to lose weight just by having a visual reminder of what they consume.
No tricks, no gimmicks – it’s the only really effective way to maintain a balanced diet and keep the weight off.
