Friday, October 3, 2008

Keeping track with a "little blue book"

To assist DPP participants in losing weight, they are asked to keep a journal of what they eat and how often they exercise. These journals are referred to by participants and coaches alike as “little blue books” and are a very important part of taking pounds off and keeping them off.

To help out with monitoring, participants are also provided a DPP Fat and Calorie Counter. As we all know, deciphering the contents of what you eat can be tiresome, but inside this pamphlet fat gram and calorie contents of a variety food are presented in a user friendly manner. If you have a turkey sandwich for lunch, you look up all the ingredients, write them down and total them up. Its just that easy!


Once you have determined the ingredients of the foods you eat often, writing down your daily intake will become faster, easier and less time consuming if you refer to previous blue books.

The original DPP found that monitoring was the key to success. They also found that writing down what you ate and physical activity was important for maintaining weight loss. In the Montana Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes Prevention Program we found similar results.

So if you are part of the prevention program in your area and you are experiencing the blue book blues or if you are just trying to adopt a healthy lifestyle; remember those who do the work are able to lose the weight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I learned very much from my daily log. I filled it out daily, which forced me to learn much more than I ever knew about food calories and fat.