The first question I asked every new client was not about food. The intake call had all the expected rows (meal timings, portion sizes, how often you eat out) but the questions I actually cared about were further down the sheet: What does food mean in your life? Are you an emotional eater, a stress eater? How fast do you chew? What was your favourite sport as a kid?
You can tell what a coaching practice really believes by what it asks in the first phone call. Mine believed the food log was the easy part.
Lived Between 2019 and 2022 I ran a nutrition coaching practice called The Protein Shek. It started with people I knew, acquaintances more than friends, asking for help, and grew, entirely by referral, into a real small business: a brand book, a website, an Instagram, a client-management platform, and somewhere around forty clients. I still have the whole archive: every plan, every format, every check-in template. This page is that story. What the system actually was, what coaching real people taught me that no certification did, and why a model built entirely on individual attention could not scale.
(Provenance, once for the whole page: everything here comes from my own files, the plans, formats and brand documents I wrote at the time. Where my old documents disagree with each other, I say so.)
How it started
I came to this as somebody who had been handed nutrition plans and had not managed to follow them. Not because the advice was wrong, but because a plan has to survive your palate, your kitchen and your actual week, and the ones I had did not. What I was short of was never information. It was the why underneath the plan, and a version of it built around a life I was really living. Working that out for myself is what turned into a method, and the method is what other people started asking for.
Living abroad for university helped, in an accidental way: it forced me to shop and cook for myself, which is rarer than it sounds, and it quietly taught me what actually goes into a dish. Quantities, proportions, what happens when you change one thing.
I took the study seriously along the way: a Stanford Food and Health course, then the ISSA Sports Nutrition certification, both completed. I’ll leave the credentials at that, deliberately: this page isn’t about becoming a nutritionist, and neither, it turned out, was the practice.
I never wanted it to be a business. The first few clients were people I’d met, known faces, not necessarily friends, and I helped because I could. They pushed me to start charging, so I charged a little, mostly so the thing would be taken seriously. And then people kept wanting to come on board, because the ones already on board were feeling better, and I won’t pretend that didn’t feel good. The referrals compounded, and the clientele changed under me as they did: from those first known faces to fancier clients, corporate people, and at one point a film star preparing for an upcoming movie. My own documents can’t agree on the final count: “over 25” in my first-year bio, “over 35” in an Instagram script, forty folders in the archive, “40–50” in the brand book. Somewhere in there is the truth, and the disagreement itself tells you how fast an informal thing became a real one.
The system
The practice ran on a loop I refined until it was almost mechanical, and I can reconstruct every step of it from the formats folder.
It started with a form. An email with homework: contact and basics, dietary preferences and restrictions, a food diary with examples (“if meals vary a lot, give me 2–3 examples for each meal”), gut issues, medication, family history, goals, activity level, and your latest blood test if you had one. That email carried a line I still stand behind: “Every bit of extra effort from you will be met by significantly more effort from me.” The form did what forms are good at. It collected the facts before I spent a minute of conversation on them.
Then the call, which was the actual work. With the facts already in hand, the phone call could go where the form couldn’t: routine, timings, portions, hunger levels, movement through the day, the foods you cannot live without, how often you eat out, and then the part that mattered. Your relationship with food. Your stress. Whether you eat fast or slow. Whether anyone had ever asked you what food means to you. And one question that always surprised people, what was your favourite sport or activity as a child?, because the fastest way back into movement is usually something you already loved.
What I was really doing on that call was looking for three things: your patterns, your preferences, and your mental blocks. The form gave me what you ate. The conversation gave me why you ate it, what you had already failed at, and which parts of the plan you were quietly going to refuse. You cannot design a plan someone will actually follow without all three, and none of the three arrives in writing. They come out sideways, in how someone answers a question they weren’t expecting.
Then the plan, emailed with instructions to print it and put it on the fridge, which sounds quaint and worked better than any app notification I have ever received. Timed meals, each with two or three options rather than one prescription, because a plan with no choices is a plan you abandon the first time an option isn’t available. Dessert was scheduled (twice a week, allowed, on the plan) because the alternative isn’t “no dessert,” it’s guilt plus dessert. With it went the Munching Manual, my client education guide, and a weekly food diary.
Then Fridays. Every Friday a check-in went out: “Hey Champ!!”, a ten-minute form about the week, the food diary update, and an open offer of a weekend call. The stated goal in my own template: “to have a clear picture of what we did during the week so we can become more aware of our habits & patterns.” Awareness first, adjustment second. Renewals happened or didn’t based on those Fridays, and mostly they happened.
Behind it all sat real tooling: a practice-management platform, shared drives, tracked diaries. It was a behaviour-change system wearing a diet’s clothes, and the longer I ran it the less I pretended otherwise.
What an Indian plan actually looks like
Most nutrition content, then and now, is written for someone else’s kitchen. Mine was written for ours, and the specifics are where the practice lived.
Portions were measured in the units people actually use: a chapatti is seven inches, two katoris make a bowl, vegetables are counted in handfuls, four a day, plus a fruit. The Munching Manual organised produce by Indian season (karela, lauki, turai, methi in their months; jowar, bajra, nachni among the grains) because “eat seasonal” is useless advice without naming what’s in season here. Water was three to four litres a day, and every plan ended the day with two glasses before bed.
There were brand calls, because “eat more protein” dies at the supermarket shelf: Epigamia for Greek yogurt, Nutrela for soya chunks, a specific tofu with 12g+ protein per 100g, a vegetable chopper and cooking-spray oil that quietly saved ~100 kcal per meal. There was an alcohol strategy rather than an alcohol ban: once a week, spirits over beer and wine, water or soda as the mixer, get your training in that day. And there was a mess-up protocol, written in exactly these words in the manual: “Move on. Shit happens. We aren’t perfect.” The rule that followed it, always train the day after a mess-up, did more for my clients’ consistency than any macro split, because it converted guilt into a scheduled action.
The brand voice sat on top of all of it. I hated the word diet and said so. The line I used was “we don’t cheat, we treat”, and the whole positioning, per my own brand book, was to break the obsession with numbers and crash results. I was explicitly not a five-kgs-in-five-weeks guy. The promise was a lifestyle change, explained as we went, so that clients would eventually not need me. “You are the BOSS of your body” is a sentence I actually wrote to clients, and meant.
What forty clients taught me
The system’s design already tells you what I believed by the end, because every mechanism in it was a correction of something that had failed: options instead of prescriptions, because prescriptions get abandoned. Education baked into every plan, down to a YouTube tutorial link on every exercise in the workout manuals, because a client who understands why doesn’t need you forever, and a client who doesn’t will need you forever and still quit. A weekly rhythm rather than daily policing, because awareness of patterns beats surveillance of meals. And scheduled indulgence, because any plan at war with pleasure loses.
But those are the shallow lessons, the ones that show up in templates. The deeper ones took all forty clients.
Lived The system was grown, not designed. The intake form I ended with was not the one I started with. Questions earned their place, or lost it, one client at a time, and the skill that actually developed was not what to ask but how: the nuance of asking so a person genuinely answers, and the nuance of reading what the answers meant. A repeatable process came out the far end, but it was built from unrepeatable conversations.
Education is alignment. I began by believing I educated clients so they could eventually be independent; it’s right there in my old scripts. The clients taught me something one level deeper: a person who understands why the plan says what it says is on the plan’s side. Most of the non-compliance I saw was not weakness. It was people executing instructions they had no stake in.
No single approach fits two people. That reads as a platitude until you have run the same process forty times and watched it need to become forty different things. The framework repeated; the application never did.
And the biggest one, which I only fully understood at the end: my real product was not nutrition plans. It was empathy and care. Being someone’s accountability partner, the person who actually read the Friday check-in and noticed. That was my strength, and it was also the limit, because care like that is not easily replicable. I tried to delegate it. It didn’t work. That is not a staffing problem; it is a flaw in the business model, and the next section is what it cost.
Why it ended
Here is what the archive says, and it is strangely eloquent: the last dated client plans are from February 2022. The content calendar stops the same month. After that, nothing. No wind-down email in the formats folder, no farewell post in the marketing folder. A practice that documented everything did not document its own ending.
Lived The reason is less dramatic than the silence suggests: the model I had built could not scale. Everything that made it work was individual attention: the intake phone call, a plan written around one person’s palate and household, the Friday check-in actually read, the offer of a weekend call actually meant. None of that compresses. Every new client cost the same hours as the last one, my hours were the whole company, and the one attempt to hand the caring part of the job to someone else had already shown me it didn’t transfer. Forty clients wasn’t the beginning of that model. It was its ceiling.
And the point had never been to run a practice at its ceiling. The point, from the very first plan I wrote for someone I barely knew, was to help people, to create impact wider than my own calendar. For that, the method needed technology that could carry it: keep the individual attention, stop paying for it in my hours. In 2022, that technology didn’t exist in any form I could build on. It does now. Which is not the end of this story. It is why this page exists.
What I would automate now
Worth being precise about what “the tech now exists” means, because it is not “an app instead of a coach.” It is that almost every individual step of what I did by hand now has a simple, unglamorous automation, and the one step that doesn’t is the interesting one.
The clearest example is the intake. The form was never the bottleneck; forms have always scaled. The bottleneck was the call after it: an hour on the phone with each person, chasing patterns, preferences and mental blocks through questions they weren’t expecting. That is a conversation, and until very recently a conversation meant a human. A voice agent can hold that conversation now. Not as a gimmick but as the actual mechanism: it can ask the behavioural questions, follow the thread when someone hesitates, and hand back a structured read of what it heard. Everything downstream of that call was already automatable; the call was what kept the whole practice tied to my calendar.
| What I did by hand | What replaces it now |
|---|---|
| Intake form | Unchanged. Forms were always the easy half |
| The hour-long intake call | A voice agent that asks the behavioural questions and follows up on the hesitations |
| Reading the answers for patterns, preferences and blocks | The conversation becomes structured context instead of living in my memory |
| Writing a plan with two or three options per meal | Generated against that person’s real constraints, and regenerated when their life changes, which was previously a renewal cycle away |
| The Munching Manual, read once and filed | Explanation available at the moment of the decision, which is when anybody actually wants it |
| The Friday check-in I read when I had capacity | Read every week, without exception, because capacity stopped being the constraint |
(Provenance: this is design, not a product. None of it exists yet. Every row above is reasoning about a system I ran for three years, not a description of software you can use.)
I do intend to build it. Not as a business plan. I like building things with AI, and this is the problem I know better than any other, so it is the obvious thing to point that at. It will be iterative and it will be improved in public, and when there is something real to use, this page will link to it. Until then the table above is a design, and I would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.
And here is the part I genuinely do not know the answer to. What my clients actually paid for was not the plans. It was that somebody was paying attention to them. I could not delegate that to another person; I tried, and it was the flaw that closed the practice. Whether it delegates to a machine is a real question, not a rhetorical one, and I am suspicious of anyone who answers it confidently in either direction. The honest position is that the parts of coaching that are information clearly automate, the parts that are structure probably automate, and the part that is someone noticing is unproven. I would rather run that experiment on myself and say what happened than sell the conclusion in advance.
What survived, and what didn’t
The knowledge survived. The practising of it did not.
What happened after is so ordinary that writing it down feels almost redundant, which is exactly why it is worth writing down. COVID, then marriage, then work getting heavy: long stretches living away from home, eating whatever the day allowed, training falling off the schedule first because it is always the thing that falls off first. The weight came back. The rhythm went. None of it was a decision; that is the whole point. It is the same drift I used to design plans to survive, happening to the person who designed the plans.
Knowing the science protects you from nothing. I could still write you a good plan through all of it. I just wasn’t following one. If you have ever wondered whether the people handing out nutrition advice are quietly better at this than you are, there is your answer, and it is not a flattering one.
Two things did survive untouched. The agenda: this was never really about nutrition plans, it was about helping people, and that is what I intend to stick to. And the loss of the thing I had been proudest of at the time, which was certainty: coaching taught me the science, and the years since have taught me how much of what I confidently believed about my own body deserved testing rather than trusting. That is its own page, and this garden will get to it.
Which makes me the client
Going back through all of this to write it (the intake questions, the check-in templates, the manual I wrote for people in exactly the position I am now in) the conclusion was not subtle.
The Protein Shek has one client left, and it is me. I am ready to be that client again: the same intake, the same honest food diary, the same Friday accountability, applied by the person who used to run it to the person who has been avoiding it.
Which is also the real reason the section above this one is not idle speculation. I am not designing that system for a hypothetical user. I am designing it because I need it, I know precisely what it has to do, and I would rather build the thing than write another plan that nobody, including me, ends up following.
Message me
If you’re trying to fix how you eat and every plan you’ve been given has died within a month, I have sat on both sides of that table, the client who couldn’t comply and the coach designing for clients who couldn’t comply, and at the moment I am sitting on the client side again. I’m not selling coaching; the practice is closed. But the conversation is open, and the awkward first question, what does food actually mean in your life?, is still the right place to start.
Email: abhishek@terrak.ai LinkedIn: Abhishek Chaudhry
I read both. No comments section here, deliberately. A message means you actually wanted to talk, and that’s the conversation worth having.
What’s changed
- 30 August 2026. Published.