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The person behind the product
Jimenez Julien
Founder of MLJ, SASU and the product lead for NourishPlanner. He writes the copy on this site, ships the releases, and answers the support email you would write to.
Why I built NourishPlanner
I did not come to dietetics through a clinic. I came to it through a spreadsheet. A registered dietitian in Sacramento hired me to sort out why her billing hours and her calendar hours had drifted so far apart, and the answer turned out to be sitting in plain sight: she was spending roughly a fifth of every counseling session helping a client remember what she had eaten since the last one. That is not counseling. That is unpaid data entry performed out loud by two people, one of whom is guessing.
She had tried the obvious fixes. A food logging app that her clients abandoned in eleven days. A shared document that turned into thirty documents. Text message check ins she typed herself on Sunday evenings, which worked beautifully until she took a vacation. The pattern I kept seeing across her practice, and then across two dozen others I sat with, was that the intervention was excellent and the week between sessions was invisible. So I built the smallest thing that could make the week visible without asking the client to do more work than she was willing to do.
The first version was crude. It sent a plan on Sunday and one question a day, and it charted the answers. That was it. But the dietitians who tested it told me something I did not expect: the value was not the plan, it was the Thursday. Knowing on Thursday that a client had skipped three dinners meant they could reach out mid week, while the week could still be saved, instead of performing an autopsy fourteen days later. Everything since then has been built around protecting that one moment.
What I learned about this trade
Three things, and I got all three wrong at first. The first is that dietitians do not want a meal plan generator. They have opinions about food, formed over years and often over a graduate degree, and a tool that generates plans from a stranger's database insults those opinions. So the library is yours. You put your recipes in it, your portions, your language, and the product moves them around.
The second is that adherence is not a moral category. Nobody who has counseled a woman working two jobs believes that a skipped dinner is a character flaw. What practitioners want is the pattern, not a compliance score, which is why the adherence view surfaces the weekday and the meal slot that keeps failing rather than a percentage with a red badge on it. The third thing I learned is that a private practice is a small business with brutal margins, and any software that charges per client is charging a tax on the practitioner's growth. So we never do.
How I work with practitioners in this vertical
I run a call with a working dietitian most weeks, and I keep a standing group of eleven practitioners across seven states who see features before anyone else. Nothing ships on the strength of my own opinion. If a feature cannot be explained to a busy clinician in one sentence and used correctly on the first try, it goes back. When someone in that group tells me a screen is wrong, I believe her before I believe my analytics.
What I am accountable for
Uptime, the safety of client health information, the accuracy of every number published on this site, and a reply to your email inside one business day. If I get something wrong, the correction goes on the page rather than into a changelog nobody reads.
Experience and expertise
- Founder of MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes NourishPlanner and operates it for US practices.
- Twelve years building operational software for small service businesses, the last four spent entirely in health and nutrition workflows.
- Direct product research with 40 US private practices in dietetics, including ride along observation of live counseling sessions with client consent.
- Responsible for the data protection posture of the product, including the business associate agreement offered on every plan.
How this product is built and maintained
Releases go out on a two week cycle, and every release note is written in plain language rather than version numbers. Editorial standards on this site are simple: every statistic published here comes from our own aggregated, de identified account data or from a named public source, and if a figure cannot be substantiated it does not go on the page. Marketing claims are reviewed against the product before publication, so what you read here is what the software does today, not what it might do next quarter. Client health information is never used for marketing, never sold, and never used to train models. Support is handled by a human, and that human is usually me.
Published articles
Everything I have written so far in The Counseling Table, the NourishPlanner magazine for registered dietitians who run their own practice.
- How do I actually get credentialed with insurance panels as a private practice dietitian?
- Should I bill insurance or stay cash pay for my nutrition counseling practice?
- What are the most common reasons my 97802 and 97803 claims get denied?
- What does HIPAA actually require from me as a solo dietitian using a meal plan app?
- How did one dietitian rebuild her practice around group visits instead of one on ones?
- Is licensure portability changing where I can counsel nutrition clients across state lines?
- What should be in my intake packet before a new nutrition client's first session?
- How much does it really cost me to deliver one hour of nutrition counseling?
- Why do so many of my clients stop following the meal plan by the second week?
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question, a complaint or a feature request. If you want to see the product against your own caseload, the demo request form is the fastest route. You can also find me here: