Nutrition Coaching Intake Form Template

Ask people to describe their diet and you get their aspirations; ask what they ate yesterday and you get their diet. That single design choice — recall over self-assessment — is the spine of this intake, and it is why coaches who use it walk into consultation one holding a working picture instead of a wellness essay.

Yesterday's plate. The walk-me-through-yesterday question is required, long-form, and placed after easier questions have built momentum. One honest day beats any summary of an imagined average: it exposes meal timing, snacking patterns, liquid calories, and the takeaway-to-cooked ratio without a single judgmental question being asked. A coach reads it in thirty seconds and sees the first three interventions.

Restrictions and medicine before advice. The eating-patterns multi-select captures hard constraints — vegetarian through kosher — that any plan must respect from meal one; violating them even once costs the client's trust permanently. The medical field sits beside it because nutrition advice has real interactions: thyroid medication, diabetes, an enthusiastic supplement stack. The coach who knows stays useful; the coach who doesn't is guessing in a lab coat.

Capacity, not intention. How often someone cooks and whether they will genuinely log meals are capacity questions, and they shape the coaching format more than any goal statement. A never-cooks client needs assembly meals and restaurant frameworks, not recipes. A won't-log client needs photo check-ins or habit anchors, not a food diary that dies by Thursday. The logging select offers "short stretches only" because that honest middle exists, and pretending it doesn't just manufactures fake compliance.

Kept off the form. Weight, measurements, and body-composition targets. On a first-contact form those numbers cost trust and add nothing a first session cannot gather with context and consent. Same for progress photos. This form's job is understanding; measurement comes later, inside the relationship.

Who uses this. Nutrition and habit coaches send it between signup and session one. Private-practice dietitians adapt the medical field to their intake standards. Gyms bolting nutrition onto training packages clone it and link it from the member welcome email. Long answers take time, and that's fine — partial responses save as clients type, so a form finished across two evenings still arrives whole.

Make it yours. Localize the eating-pattern options to your clientele and cuisine. Add a scale block if your framework rates hunger or energy. Keep notifications on so finished intakes reach your inbox before the first session, and export the whole client roster as CSV when you want to see intake patterns across your practice — the cooking-frequency column alone will change what you prescribe.