I'm Andres Ayesta — Registered Dietitian, former sports nutrition coach at IMG Academy, and the founder of Planos Nutrition. This is the story of why I built it, who it's for, and the philosophy that runs through everything we do.
I grew up in Venezuela wearing a toy stethoscope at four years old. Medicine was the plan — the prestigious path, the one my family and I had set my sights on from as far back as I can remember. I'm a Virgo by nature. Analytical, methodical, the kind of person who overthinks every decision. So I did what that kind of person does. I studied hard, chased the top scores, and aimed for the most competitive medical school in the country.
On my final year of high school, I took the entrance exam for my dream program at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Ten thousand people took it. Thirty were accepted. I placed three-hundredth.
That was supposed to be the end of the story. It turned out to be the beginning of a better one.
Around that time I learned something that changed everything — doctors aren't the only ones wearing white coats in a hospital. The same university ran a Dietetics program inside its school of medicine. I figured I'd transfer in, stay a year, and move across to medicine when the door opened. I never transferred.
Somewhere between biochemistry and physiology, I fell in love with the way food actually moves through the body. How it shapes energy, hormones, recovery, cognition — every system we rely on to feel like ourselves. And a line from a cousin of mine landed and never left:
"Why treat disease when you can prevent it?"
That question has been running in the background of everything I've built since.
Growing up I played every sport I could get my hands on. I was the kid who was GOOD at everything but never GREAT at any one thing — which, as it turned out, was useful. It gave me a respect for the people who are great, and a front-row view of what separates them.
My original plan was sports medicine. When I discovered sports nutrition was its own world, the plan sharpened. I wanted to work with the best athletes on the planet, and there was no better place to do that than the United States.
I earned a scholarship to the University of Southern Indiana, finished my degrees in Nutrition and Dietetics, and moved into the Dietetic Internship Program at the University of Houston — rotating through the Texas Medical Center and the UH Athletics department, where I spent a summer prepping the football team for their season. That rotation is where it clicked. Sports nutrition wasn't going to be a chapter. It was the whole book.
I cold-emailed IMG Academy from that rotation. A few interviews later, I was moving to Bradenton as a sports nutrition coach.
I spent the next five years there, working with some of the most driven people on the planet — NFL Draft prospects, MLB players, elite junior athletes, and the coaches who shape them. That's where I learned the thing that changed how I think about nutrition for everyone, not just athletes.
"Nutrition can make a good athlete great, and a great athlete good."
The point wasn't about performance. The point was that what you eat is either quietly pulling you forward or quietly holding you back. There is no neutral. Athletes understand this instinctively — their career depends on it. Everyone else has been taught to treat nutrition like a diet to get through, rather than a system to live inside.
At IMG I also went through my own transformation. I trained alongside the strength coaches, the mental conditioning coaches, the athletic trainers. I absorbed everything I could from people operating at the highest level of their craft. Eventually I left to pursue my Masters in Exercise Science and Sports Nutrition under Dr. Jeff Stout — one of the most respected names in the field.
From there I became the Director of Performance Nutrition at the Applied Science and Performance Institute, where the client list widened — professional athletes, Olympians, CEOs, high performers from every industry. The gap between "athlete" and "executive" started to feel a lot smaller than I'd been told it was.
Over 13 years I've had the privilege of coaching a range of people most dietitians only ever read about — NFL players including Mike Evans and Darius Leonard, MLB veterans Francisco Cervelli and Bobby Abreu, WWE athlete Rinku Singh, and high-profile clients across entertainment and business.
But the names on the marquee aren't what this work is really about. The majority of my career has been spent with the other 700+ — executives, founders, parents, operators, and everyday people who were tired of starting over. The person running a company. The partner in a firm. The surgeon between shifts. The dad trying to model something better for his kids.
Every single one of them gets the same foundation the athletes get. The only thing that changes is the application.
By the time I left institutional athletics, I had two things in my head that wouldn't leave.
The first — I had gone through my own transformation at IMG. I knew what it felt like to rebuild my body, my energy, and my confidence from the inside out. I wanted to help other people do that. Not just the ones with a contract and a locker room.
The second — I had always wanted to build something of my own. Something that could scale the work beyond the hours I had in a day.
Planos started as Vive Nutrition with a simple line: Eat to Live. Live to Perform. After years of refining what the work actually was, the brand caught up to it. Planos is Spanish for blueprints. That one word is the whole ethos — nutrition is not a plan you follow. It is a blueprint you build, live inside of, and adapt as your life changes.
Planos is that blueprint, built for you.
The philosophy that runs through every client program, every piece of content, and every decision I make at Planos.
No eating style is morally superior to another. I've personally experimented with fasting, keto, carnivore, and everything in between — not because any of them are the answer, but to understand them from the inside. The one that works is the one you can actually live with long term.
There are no "good" foods and no "bad" foods. Some are better at fueling your body than others — that's it. The moral framework most people carry around food is usually what's keeping them stuck, not the food itself.
Rigid plans produce short-term results and long-term failure. A sustainable system adapts to travel, family, work stress, and life's curveballs — because those things are not going anywhere.
The boring, repetitive, unsexy work is what actually moves the needle. It will never go viral. It will always outperform whatever is trending this month.
The belief that you have to be perfect at everything is what makes people quit. My job is to replace that instinct with a system that keeps working even when you're not at 100 percent.
Most clients don't need to track harder, cut deeper, or train more. They need to see what they're actually doing. Clarity almost always comes before change.
I get asked a lot if I eat the way I coach people to eat. The answer is yes — and the details are less impressive than most people expect them to be.
I track macros when I'm working toward a specific goal. When I'm not, I use tracking for awareness and reference rather than rules. I eat with flexibility. I have pizza most Fridays because I know exactly how it fits inside the rest of the week. I train two to three times minimum, aiming for five to six. I go through periods where my weight drifts up — I allow a buffer, and when I hit the edge of it, I course-correct without drama.
The most important thing I ever let go of was the idea that I had to be perfect. What replaced it was a system that kept working whether I was traveling, stressed, or off-routine. It's not flashy. It's not a diet. It's a blueprint — and it's the same one I hand to clients.
I'm raising my son inside that same framework. Taking care of your health is a family value in my house, not a seasonal project. That quiet, generational version of the work is the part I care about most.
The thing that bothers me most about my field is how easy it is for the loudest, least qualified voices to dominate the conversation. Influencers with no training repackaging information they don't understand. Fad diets cycling through every eighteen months, branded as a breakthrough. Supplements sold as shortcuts to work that doesn't have shortcuts.
The consistent, boring, evidence-based work that actually changes people's lives does not go viral. I've made peace with that — and built Planos around it anyway.
What you get here is the opposite of the noise. Credentialed. Specific. Built on a foundation of science, clinical experience, and more than a decade of pattern recognition from real clients. No moral panic around food. No rigid rules. No gurus.
Just a blueprint — and someone qualified enough to help you build it.
The core of the work. Every Planos client gets a personalized blueprint built on the three pillars — nutrition, lifestyle, and mindset. This is where real transformation happens and where I learn what actually works.
YouTube, social, podcasts, the newsletter, masterclasses, courses. Every piece of content exists to raise the baseline of what people know about their own bodies — and to push back against the misinformation that dominates online.
Planos is expanding into partnerships with concierge medical practices, clinics like DexaFit, corporate wellness programs, and aligned brands. Nutrition belongs at the center of modern medicine and performance — not the edges. The mission is to put it there.
The most reliable first step isn't a program. It's a number. Start with your macros — the data-driven baseline every Planos client begins with.