Lean Mode, Color Code - Not Your Usual Food Diary Paperback – October 18, 2008

I have been using the  Lean Mode, Color Code - Not Your Usual Food Diary  every day and it has helped me stick with my small habit change goals. I look forward to coloring in the circle for one of my habit goals - my no-candy-days. UPDATE: I've been at it for 3 more weeks and have lost 10 lb. I'm very heavy so 10 lb is easy to lose at my weight but not without focus and determination. This book has been a great tool for me.I have goals to stay within a 1600-1800 calorie range, eat more protein, fruits and vegetables. It's surprising how few servings of vegs and fruits I ate when I started using this book. Seeing habits in writing and colored circles or that lack of colored circles works better than logging info into a web site. The circles are powerful mental motivators for me. I see them in my mind's eye while I'm choosing to eat protein, a vegetable or fruit or not eat candy and I get an immediate inner glow reward that I'm doing something good and right for myself. Good for me. Yeah me.I've found that if I set one new goal at a time, I can successfully make a new habit to replace a negative one. I can start another habit change once the first one is solid. It's slow but better than overwhelming myself with too many new habit changes at a time. You don't give up as easily on just one change.I've learned to stop being so hard on myself, to focus primarily on one habit, taking small steps steadily, knowing I will have "bad days" but that that's just part of the habit changing process. This book seems to have you work on more than one habit at a time but although I benefit from setting goals for other healthy choices, I have only one dominant habit out of the 5 I'm keeping track of, at a time. Once it's met, one of the other 5 items will become dominant. I'm actually doing well with all of the habits right now, at this moment, which is just an extra plus as far as I'm concerned.This book has several helpful quotes on habits which help you understand the power for habits and the pleasure of good habits over life negating habits.This journal isn't meant to be an exhaustive record of all the contents of every food you eat. [...] works well for that. This journal helps you stay out of denial and aware of your choices. UPDATE: My blood sugars have gone down 40 points. My Candida has improved.I choose to change the habits I've formed over many years kindly and gently without self recrimination and self abuse. I have learned to be as gentle with myself as I would be with a child. I have loads of bad habits that have affected the quality of my life and health.This journal really does encourage me along the way. There is a story in the Introduction about a man from Chicago who had only one color on his journal pages day after day for 3 months - he had no (soda, pop or whatever you call the chemical big business has foisted on us) days. That story gave me hope. I didn't have to be perfect. His other goals weren't successfully dealt with at that time but he had 3 months of keeping vile, high calorie,no nutritional value chemicals out of his body. So I decided to reign in my compulsive, perfectionistic tendencies from day one and the first pencil mark on page one and allow myself to do this imperfectly. I was blessed to find that I was able to have not only no-candy-days but more protein, fruit and vegetable, in-calorie-range days as well.If you buy this book, and I suggest that many of you left brain types will benefit from it as I have, the authors suggest buying highlighters for your colors because they don't bleed through the pages the way colored markers do. I tried markers and highlighters out before I started and found this to be true. I'm using colored pencils - [...] a box of 12 from Dollar General - right now. I don't get the boost of bright colors but I do get color and no chance of bleed through. Crayons would also work. UPDATE: I've bought colored pens, pencils, highlighters and have tried markers and the best for color and no saturation is colored pens. These are low cost at Staples. I use all of my coloring alternatives depending on mood.Coloring circles works - When I think "candy yum", I think chocolate brown circle and want the circle more than the candy - more days out of 7 than not. I recently had a 13 day stretch without candy, cookies,cake - just Zone bars for sweets. I blew it when I didn't have my meal planned so know that doesn't work for me - must have a meal readily available. I am slurging and buying wraps from a local coffee shop and lunches that will make 2 meals from a local tea shop. This also works for me.Chocolate is a serotonin booster. Protein is too. I think that fact that I'm eating more protein is one of the reasons I can resist candy better. It all works together.

I really like the idea behind this journal. It is strangely motivating to color in the little dots at the end of the day. I am severly ADD and this keeps my attention which is highly unusual so I tend to stick to it. I do have a few complaints that are minor, but keep me from giving it that one last star. First there is not very much room to write. I write big so I often have to cram things in. Also the paper is thin and all of the four different kinds of markers that I have tried bleed through the pages. This drove me crazy for several days. I have switched to using colored pencils and am a lot happier with how the journal looks now. Finally there is very little room to make notes. I like to keep notes about things like emotions or something that may have thrown me off. This problem was easily solved with lined sticky notes, but I would have liked to have it already in the journal. That being said no product can give everyone exactly what they want, but I would (and have) recommend this journal to any woman trying to change habits for the better. This just works and its fun. Brilliant idea.

Not what i was expecting at all! Yes it is very organized BUT there are a few problems!1) It is not colorful at all, the only thing that is colorful is the cover. Yes i know your suppose to color some things in but the pages are just black & white. That wasnt what I was expecting. This shouldnt be a big deal to every one else. But my main reason for buying this was because i thought it was colorful..i could have made my own. Also the pages are kinda thin, so if you are coloring things in then i would be careful using markers.2) Not enough space!! I for one thought this was going to be a bigger size. Where your suppose to right "What you ate" theres barely any space to write anything, what so ever. The only thing that could probably fit in there is "Plain Salad with raisins" or "Frozen waffles with berries". Very basic items or meals. And very short wording.Its an OK journal, but it isnt anything unusual or special! The only thing that sets it apart from other food journals is that it is like a coloring book(definitely w/o the color) and has more of a fun organization to it.

I like that there's room enough to write a variety of foods each day, seventeen lines per page. If I'd designed it I'd have made all the categories (calories, fat, carbs, fiber, protein, fill-in-the-blank) the same width column, not a huge difference between them, but I noticed it. The pages have a decent thickness to them. Highlighters truly work best, although I've found markers to work as well. The highlighters I've tried are Sharpie and Pilot Frixion. The markers I used were Crayola. So long as you don't color the same area over and over again there's no bleed through. You can see the color through the page if there's light nearby, like a lamp, but it won't interfere with your ability to write on the current page. I'd have liked it if amazon included a marker or highlighter recommendation , and a discounted price, for buying both this journal and the coloring agents at once lol

I just got started with it for the new year. I like the format and I think it will be fun to use. You can make it as detailed or simplistic as you like. My only complaint is that the pages are too thin. If you use markers as recommended, they bleed through to quite a number of pages. I'm going to switch to crayons or perhaps colored pencils.

Love the food diary but was surprised that the more recent edition eliminated the spiral bound way of holding the book together, which I found very useful. I miss the spiral bound feature of these books -- the earlier editions were easier to use. Still a great book, though!

There is NO COLOR in this book. The spaces are TOO SMALL to write in, and it is not very user friendly. The book is HUGE (9x11), and you can not take it with you easily. I replaced this $19 waste of money with a $1.99 pocket sized spiral notebook. I wish I could have seen the book before purchase, and that would have saved me $$.

Too much work and not a rewarding system for me.

Hope this will keep me on track.

Its okay, maybe a good way to control diet for some people but it just didn't work for me... Gets a bit boring after a while...