Equalution Review (2023) 1:1 Nutritionist & Diet Service

Losing weight is hard.

Being able to maintain a caloric deficit over an extended time period is particularly difficult without support from people around you.

It’s been proven the having access to one-on-one health coaching makes a significant difference to losing weight and keeping that weight off.

That’s where Equalution comes in. A pocket nutrition coach that gets you access to recipes tailored to your needs, as well as access to a personal nutritionist.

This Equalution review is based on my real experiences trying their 3-month nutrition support program. I hope my experiences help you understand whether Equalution is the right weight loss service for you.

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What is Equalution?

When I first heard of Equalution, I must admit I didn’t really understand what their service offered. Since you don’t actually get any food, I wondered what was on offer to justify the subscription cost?

Well, an Equalution subscription primarily gets you access to:

• 1-on-1 nutrition coaching from a qualified nutritionist (with their premium plan).
• Weekly meal plans that meet your individual caloric needs.
• An advanced food intake tracking module.
• Weight, measurement and picture tracking.

If I could summarise what Equalution is all about, it’s accountability and support. There’s no doubt these are two huge elements of building a sustainable weight loss habit.

Where some weight loss programs focus on extreme measures like juicing, fasting, or ketosis, Equalution encourage more practical, flexible, and sustainable dieting.

Their core service is digital via a mobile app, so it’s available to anyone in Australia no matter which state you live in. There are also international plans for people living outside of Australia.

Who are Equalution?

With weight loss, it’s so incredibly important you trust the advice you’re receiving. That’s why I like to dig into who created the service.

Equalution was founded by Jade Spooner and Amal Wakim, who built Equalution after quitting their Jobs at Google in 2015. The idea was formed from their own weight loss journey after trying flexible dieting and succeeding with a 50kg weight loss between the pair. These principles have guides the Equalution offering ever since.

Over time, Jade and Amal have built a wealth of resources & recipes available to all customers, as well as a team of nutritionists, dietitians, and trainers who are responsible for providing individual guidance to those on a premium plan.

Equalution has now become one of the largest nutrition coaching services in Australia. 300k Instagram followers show that this isn’t just another short-term trendy dieting option.

What is it like subscribing to Equalution?

Signing up to Equalution kicks off a “getting to know you” phase. You’re asked to provide a wide array of personal details that they’ll use to build your nutrition plan.

They’ll need to know your gender, birthday, height, current weight, activity levels, and number of exercise days. All of these contribute to your individual macro-nutritional targets and ensures the nutritionist can develop an appropriate plan for you.

Equalution interestingly don’t ask for your target weight. When I asked why, they said it was because everyone’s journey is different and will take different lengths of time. Most people would be expected to drop between 300g – 500g on an Equalution plan, and they don’t encourage people to ‘over-diet’ to lose weight quicker as this is often unsustainable.

You’re then asked to provide a detailed taste preference list, selecting ingredients from an extensive list to prevent them from appearing in your meal plans. Whilst this isn’t totally exhaustive, it does cover most common ingredients.

Lastly, you’ll complete your first “check-in” by taking 5 measurements from across your body. The focus is on your forearms, chest, waist, hips, and thighs.

Thankfully, there are detailed instructions on exactly how and where to take these measurements consistently. It’s very useful to have a soft tape measure (pick one up for $3 at Kmart!) so you can reliably take measurements every week.

The app will explain what your calorific target is, as well as the split between protein, fat, carbs, and fibre. The expectation is for your to hit that target every day, leading you to a consistent caloric deficit, rather than trying to “beat” the target.

What features does Equalution have?

Overall, it’s important to know that Equalution is only available through their mobile app. There’s no way to interact through the website, so you’ll need to have a smartphone that is capable of downloading the Equalution app.

Weekly Check-Ins

One of the core features is an expectation you’ll submit a weekly check-in to the app. If you’re on the premium service, this check-in will then be reviewed by your personal nutritionist.

These check-ins occur every week, with mine starting a few days after joining once the nutritionist had a chance to say hi and kickstart my meal plan.

That meant I was weighing, taking pictures, and measuring myself every Thursday morning before 11am, with the results sent directly to my nutritionist.

I found it incredibly motivating to know that I was tracking my progress on a weekly basis, with any changes in my body quickly noticeable.

As mentioned earlier, a few hours after each check-in I’d receive a personal message from my nutritionist talking about my progress and providing extra motivation. The intent was always to provide feedback to work on and improve for the week ahead, which does rely on you being consistent, honest, and accurate with tracking your daily food intake.

Personal Nutritionist (Premium plan only!)

When you join Equalution on the premium plan, you’ll receive a message in the app from a nutritionist who’s assigned individually to you.

In my case, I was working with Lara. Lara was available to me Monday – Friday for any questions I had, or to discuss anything related to my health plans. This can be as comprehensive as you want it to be, although you’re paying for it so I would highly recommend reaching out to them regularly. It’s an amazing way of holding yourself accountable to your daily goals.

Over the course of a 3-month period, she really got to understand my situation very deeply, so her advice was always 100% personalised to me.

We had quite a few interesting conversations about different elements of my nutrition, including how to handle holidays, dealing with setbacks, finding alternative ingredients, and how best to track unknown meals.

Having access to Lara was comfortably the best part of subscribing to Equalution, as she was someone holding me accountable and supporting me on my weight loss journey.

Although you won’t be able to reach you nutritionist on weekends, I always found Lara to be highly responsive throughout the week.

Towards the end of my plan, Lara went on holiday for a week. Impressively, I was quickly messaged by a new nutritionist who had access to all of my historic messages and seamlessly took over from Lara for a week.

If you feel alone on your weight loss journey, I can’t recommend having access to one of Equalution’s nutritionists enough.

The only downside was that there’s no option to schedule a video or phone call, so you can have an in-depth conversation. Everything happens over the in-app chat messaging system.

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Meal Plans

Most nutrition services will provide you with a full recipe library that you can cook from. Equalution does things a little different by providing just one full day’s worth of recipes every week.

This means that you’ll receive new recipes for 1 Breakfast, 2 Snacks, 1 Lunch, 1 Dinner and 1 Dessert on every check-in day.

When I asked Lara about this, she explained that it was because they had discovered people are more likely to follow a diet when meals were simple and consistent. It also allows you to cook multiple portions of each meal and make subsequent days much easier.

Equalution reached out to me after writing this review to let me know that it is possible to receive more than one weekly meal plan on the premium plan. I’m not sure why my coach didn’t offer this to me, but you should be able to get this by asking your nutrition coach to increase these plans to any number between 2 – 7 each week.

I can understand the logic of providing just 1 meal plan per week, as they are removing the uncertainty from your meal planning. Just prep the same meals every day and you’ll definitely hit your weight loss targets.

If you see your meals for the coming week and there’s a recipe you don’t like, you can request for it to be switched out for a similar recipe with the same nutritional profile. Either the app will do this for you automatically, or your nutritionist can adjust your recipes.

There are two main downsides to this approach, which is something I struggled with:

1. It feels like you’re encouraged to eat the exact same meals all week, leading to a lack of variety in your diet. Whilst you’ll be able to track your own meals in the food diary, this might be difficult for people on the standard plan who don’t have the support of a 1:1 nutritionist.
2. The recipes are provided each week, so you’ll need to plan your shopping around the day new recipes are made available. Sometimes it took me a few days to get to Coles which was frustrating.

It’s important to keep in mind that you don’t have to follow Equalution’s provided meal plan every day. As long as you’re keeping to your macronutrient targets, you’ll still be making progress towards your goals.

Meal Recipes

One of the things that stood out to me over 3 months of Equalution was just how normal the recipes are.

Most of the time, I didn’t feel like I was dieting at all. There was no reliance on boring, plain salads. Just a focus on correct portion sizes and smart ingredient hacks.

Here are some example dinner recipes I received:

• BBQ Chicken Pizza
• Beef Bolognese Pasta
• Buffalo Chicken Meatballs with Potato Gems
• Peri Peri Steak with Homemade Wedges
• Betty’s Fake Away Cheeseburger

Each recipe comes with a detailed ingredients list, branded so it’s easy to find these ingredients at a large Coles or Woolworths. If you use smaller supermarkets, you may struggle to find some of the exact ingredients. For many, this might not be a terrible thing as it’s good practise to always check the nutritional contents of food so you can always find suitable alternatives.

One slightly disappointing aspect of Equalution is that the recipes themselves are very brief and purely text based. A couple of them were quite brief and I had to read between the lines to understand every step.

It’s fair to say that the recipes fall short of the quality provided by most meal kit services. However, I don’t think you’ll find this a major problem if you’re reasonably comfortable in the kitchen.

One neat feature is the ability to load these recipes straight into your food diary.

Food Diary

To know if you’re meeting your macronutritional goals, Equalution ask you to track all of your food and water intake through the app, similar to how apps like MyFitnessPal work.

Knowing your intake is critical to losing weight, especially if you’re not strictly following Equalution’s meal plan.

Inputting everything I ate into the app was a truly eye-opening excercise. There were some foods I was eating that were blowing my calorie targets out of the water. For me, that was mostly snacks.

Knowing this allowed me to adjust my habits or switch various foods to lower calorie versions.

I found it very easy to log foods using the Equalution app, with the ability to use a barcode scanner or load ingredients in from a search. If there are meals that you regularly cook, these can easily be saved so they’re added with a single tap.

Whilst it’s perhaps not as full-featured as an app like MyFitnessPal, I didn’t have any problems with finding ingredients and logging my intake. If you’re already paying for another tracking app, you could easily replace it with Equalution.

Tracking all of your intake is always time-consuming, but it’s significantly easier if you’re eating from one of our top-rated frozen meal delivery services. Most of them, especially My Muscle Chef and Lite n Easy, integrate nicely into Equalution.

How much does Equalution Cost?

Now you know what’s part of the Equalution subscription, it’s time to understand how much Equalution costs.

There are two programs available: Standard and Premium.

The only difference is that the Standard plan does not include the 1:1 nutrition coaching from a qualified nutritionist.

Length	Standard	Premium
1 Month	$69	$238
3 Months	$177 ($59/month)	$682 ($228/month)
6 Months	$294 ($49/month)	$1,183 ($197/month)

Clearly, there’s a huge cost difference between the standard and premium plans. The access to 1:1 coaching is going to set you back around an additional $150 each month.

Is Equalution good value?

We need to look at each plan in isolation, considering the huge different in price.

Equalution’s standard plan is centred around providing a consistent meal plan that meets your caloric goals, as well as a tracking and accountability app.

Considering the main alternative to this would be an app like MyFitnessPal that comes in at $29.99 a month for their premium version, I’m not sure how much extra value Equalution provides. Perhaps if you value access to a local community and the accountability of weekly check-ins, you might find Equalution is suitable for you.

In contrast, I actually think the premium plan represents very good value.

Access to 1:1 nutrition guidance isn’t cheap and it’s probably the one element that will transform your weight loss journey.

The standard price of a personal nutritionist would be between $300 – $400 a month. Considering Equalution includes all the tracking and recipe features, being able to access a nutritionist for less than $200 a month represents great value.

Check Out Equalution's Subscription OffersRated Our #1 App For 1-1 Nutrition Coaching