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The Ultimate Diet Log
A Unique Food and Exercise Diary
That Fits Any Weight-Loss Plan
By Suzanne Schlosberg and Cynthia Sass, MPH, MA, RD
Enter The “Worst Diet Ever” Contest
Win a copy of The Ultimate Diet Log plus online support from Shape columnist Cynthia Sass, MPH, MA RD, CSSD!
Make Cynthia and Suzanne laugh by recounting your worst dieting experience ever — was it the Cabbage Diet? The Master Cleanse? The week you subsisted on prunes and Diet Sprite?
We’ll choose the 10 best “worst diet ever” stories. Winners will receive a copy of The Ultimate Diet Log plus personal advice from Cynthia twice a week for 6 weeks.
Deadline: January 20
Winners will be notified via email and on Facebook by January 25th.
To enter:
- Tell us about your worst diet ever and why you feel ready to do it right this time.
- Commit to using The Ultimate Diet Log daily for 6 weeks.
- Agree to post progress reports on the wall of the book’s Facebook fan page twice a week. Cynthia will respond to each post with personal tips.
Please send your entry to one of these three places:
About The Ultimate Diet Log
Suzanne has teamed up with dietitian Cynthia Sass, MPH, MA, RD - coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Flat Belly Diet! who has appeared as a nutrition expert on "The Biggest Loser" - to create a first-of-its-kind food and exercise diary.
Research shows that a food and exercise log is, simply, the most powerful tool we have for making lasting lifestyle changes.
Consider: A study from Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research found that keeping a food diary can double a person's weight loss. The study's lead author called a food diary "hands down, the most successful weight-loss method."
Perhaps you've tried to keep a food diary before (are you rolling your eyes?), dutifully tracking your intake of protein, carbs, fat, and calories. Maybe you found the record-keeping more tedious than filling in your tax return and abandoned the project after a week or two.
This time is going to be different.
The format of The Ultimate Diet Log streamlines and personalizes the self-monitoring process in ways you probably haven't seen before. Suzanne and Cynthia cut out the cumbersome, irrelevant stuff, targeting only the information that truly pertains to your individual eating style. Here are some key features of the log:
- A 5-day personal inventory: You'll start by tracking your habits in great detail for five days and then analyzing the results. Once you've identified your strengths (calcium-rich foods? protein?) and weaknesses (chocolate muffins? overeating while you watch TV?), you'll narrow your focus to a few key priorities.
- A flexible format. The Ultimate Diet Log format is versatile enough to accommodate any healthy and reasonable eating plan, whether it's vegetarian, high-protein, low-calorie, or low-sodium. We help you figure out where to start based on your needs, on your terms.
- An emphasis on goal setting. We prompt you to record daily, weekly, and six-month eating and exercise goals and then to revisit these goals and take a good, hard look at whether you achieved them. Our mission is to maintain your motivation by holding you accountable!
- Practical tips to implement your goals. Discovering that you're short on fiber is only a first step. You also need to know how to jack up those fiber numbers, by learning, for instance, which foods have the most fiber and mastering simple ways to sneak fiber into your favorite pasta dishes. As a bonus, this log features loads of useful tips, tricks, and tidbits for putting your plans into action.
Sample Log Page
Click to view a log page (Adobe PDF).
Excerpt From The Introduction
OK, folks, it's pop-quiz time!
Question #1: How many grams of fiber have you eaten today? Eight? Eighteen? Thirty?
Question #2: How many daily vegetable servings have you averaged this week? One? Two-and-a-half? Four?
Question #3: How many sodas, lattes or sweetened teas do you sip, guzzle, or slurp in a typical month? Twelve? Twenty-four? Sixty?
If you haven't a clue how to answer these questions, welcome to the club! Most of us are simply not aware of how our eating habits stack up - life is too busy to sit around counting fiber grams, isn't it?
Yet this lack of awareness is precisely what's stopping many of us from losing weight or making the dietary improvements that will reduce our chances of developing heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. If you don't know what your habits are, how can you go about improving them?
The log you're holding is about to change everything.
Monitoring your habits is like turning up the lights and peering into one of those magnifying mirrors that facialists use when inspecting your pores: You really see what's going on, in ways that simply weren't apparent before - and aren't always so attractive.
Food and exercise diaries work because they keep you honest. Suddenly, you can't fool yourself about how much saturated fat or how few whole grains you eat. What's more, your log will reveal patterns in your habits - clues that might explain why, after three months of dieting, you still can't zip up favorite jeans.
When you actually see on paper that you're eating sweets twice a day rather than a few times a week, as you assumed, the awareness strengthens the connection between your thoughts and your actions.
Think of it as a gradual process, what we call the Four Stages of Food Awareness.
In stage one - before you start your diary - you aren't consciously aware of what you've eaten, much like the restaurant goers who said they didn't eat any bread.
In stage two, a few days to a couple weeks after you begin self-monitoring, you realize what you ate after the fact. For example, as you toss an empty potato-chip bag into the trash, it hits you that you just polished off the entire bag in one sitting.
In stage three, a few weeks later (if you're consistent about keeping your journal), you become aware of what you're eating in real time. Halfway through that maple scone, it dawns on you that you weren't even hungry when you ordered it.
Finally, you reach stage four, when your mindfulness catches up to your actions. For instance, you're about to reach for a donut in the break room and you stop, because at that moment, you connect your pattern to your habit. You might think: I had a cake donut yesterday and that peanut-butter cookie after lunch and some frozen yogurt after dinner. Maybe I'll grab an apple instead. This is the point at which real change takes place.
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