Finding the best Zone Diet Meal Plan is somewhat akin to finding the Holy Grail. Am I exaggerating? Well, I am not so sure. It is almost impossible to put together more than one, possibly two weeks of meal plans for the Zone Diet. Here is what I mean.
MAIN WEBSITE
The diet’s website does have a 7 day meal planning tool. If you register, this free tool can help you map out your week of eating. This is a decent tool, but does not offer the flexibility of the South Beach Diet’s Meal Plan tool, albeit that tool cost $5 a week.
The other issue with the Zone tool is that many of the options involve products you need/should purchase from the Zone Diet. While this is part of what you get with choosing this diet, it will soon add up to more than $5 a week.
Also, there is no grocery list option like the South Beach tool. While most diets do not have this feature, we really liked the convenience factor of having a pre printed grocery list.
Anyway, if you like the Zone Diet, the website is probably your best option for meal planning.
OTHER PLANNING OPTIONS
Like many other commercially popular diets, the Zone Diet has many different recipe books and other books that describe the diet and how to follow it. Unlike other such diets, the zone diet does not have many books that provide more than a week or two of meal plans.
This book is what it is: A quick look at the Zone Diet. The book also provides a 7 day meal plan to demonstrate how the diet works. If you are part of the ADHD crowd and need less theory and more to the point information, this is a good choice.
ZonePerfect Cooking Made Easy: Quick, Delicious Meals for Your Healthy Zone Lifestyle
This book actually has one of the longest meal plans for the Zone Diet that we found. Two full weeks of meal plans are included. The book also has many quick and easy recipes. Probably one of the best Zone Diet books to help getting your meal plan cooking!
To be fair, while the dearth of meal plan options for this diet is a little odd, the diet attempts to focus participant on making the proper independent choice when choosing their meals. The theory being that: if you know how to choose your meals properly, you will be more successful in the long term sticking with the diet
While I think this is very admirable, other diets recognize that meal planning is just easier for some people. Moreover, some of the better tools, like the South Beach Diet, allow you to see not only the meals, but also the nutritional content of food. Not to mention the automatic grocery lists development. This convenience is huge by comparison.
So, the bottom line, there are decent choices for a good Zone Diet Meal Plan. However, you may have to work a little harder to put together your own plan.
By Erich Schultz – Last Reviewed June 2012