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The Diabetes Educator - Volume 33,
Num ber 4, July/August 2007
Reviewed by Raquel Pereira, MS, RD
Drawing the Line on Calories, Carbs, and
Fat is an innovative tool for daily tracking of calories, carbs, or
fat which uses a unique and patented method not requiring any mathematic
calculations. Therefore, this tool can be an alternative to
traditional carbohydrate, calories, and fat counting which may appeal to
those who do not like the additions and numbers involved in traditional
methods. As the name itself describes, this is a method in which the
reader draws the line, connecting from one dot to the other,
proportionally to how many calories/carbohydrates/fats the reader
consumed.
It's author, Roberta Schwartz Wennik, is a
dietitian who certainly knows that keeping a food record is widely
considered a successful strategy toward glucose management and weight
management. She may have realized the potential benefit to clients
in offering a different method of food record in order to try to meet
different learning styles.
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SCAN's Pulse - Winter 2007 - Vol. 26,
No.1
Reviewed by Chris Karpinski, MS, RD
At first glance, Drawing the Line on
Calories, Carbs, and Fat may appear a bit complicated. However,
failing to dig deeper based on that initial impression would be
unfortunate, because this program is a wonderful alternative to the
standard food diary. This relatively short and easy read provides
answers to all the questions the reader may have and quickly makes the
system clear and manageable. Studies have strongly supported the
effectiveness of keeping a food diary on long-term weight maintenance.
Drawing the Line is a novel, flexible alternative to the
traditional food diary format. The system includes a double-pocket
folder that contains an Instruction Booklet, Daily Connections worksheets,
and a comprehensive wallet-sized Food Lists Booklet. The pages are
full of helpful charts, tables, illustrations, and samples of the Daily
Connection worksheets.
The Instruction Booklet begins by explaining
that Drawing the Line will help readers create a picture of what
they eat to help them make the necessary positive changes in their eating
habits. The tracking system is based on using the Daily Connections
worksheet, a matrix 48 dots high and 36 dots across. The worksheet
also contains sections to track fluids, food groups, exercise, hunger, and
blood glucose. The author encourages the reader to only use the
components that would be most helpful, adding in more components as the
program progresses. Although it is virtually impossible to describe
the tracking system without the graphics, it is extremely simple to
execute.
The basic concept of the program is that all
food items have a certain number of dots reflecting both calories and
either carbs or fat. Each time a food is eaten, vertical and horizontal
lines are drawn through the dots depending on the calories and carbs or
fat in the food. The author smartly uses the analogy of a bank
account. The idea is to work your balance down to zero each day,
rather than go into the red or leave too much in the bank.
The remainder of the Instruction Booklet
discusses such topics as determining a healthy weight and calorie level,
meal planning, shopping, label reading, portion control, dining out,
hunger control, and exercise.
The author's writing style is very
user-friendly and engaging, and she continuously reinforces information
discussed throughout the booklet. This tool could feasibly be used
in many settings, including use by individual consumers, as part of a
group program, or as an adjunct tool for RDs working with clients.
The author, Roberta Schwartz Wennik, MS, RD, is the owner of Advantage
Diets in Lynnwood, Washington.
Chris Karpinski, MS, RD, exercise
physiologist and sports nutritionist in private
practice, and adjunct professor at West Chester University, in West
Chester, Pa.
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Newsflash (Diabetes Care and Education)
- Fall 2006 -
Volume 27, Number 5
Reviewed by Maureen Sprague, MS, RD, LD,
CDE
Hood
River, Oregon
Roberta Schwartz Wennik, MS, RD, is the founder
of Advantage Diets based out of Lynnwood, Washington. She has
created a novel system and tool to help clients monitor their diet for
calories, and either fat or carb grams called Drawing the Line on
Calories, Carbs, and Fat. She has defined three different diet
approaches that can be used with this tool to better meet varying client
needs. These include the "low-carb" diet, the "low-fat" diet and the
"balanced" diet.
Just as the name implies, this tool entails
tracking calories, and grams of fat or carbs by drawing a line to connect
dots horizontally (calories) and vertically (grams of fat or carbs).
The number of dots you connect increases with the number of calories and
fat/carb grams consumed at any given time. There are guidelines for
the amount of calories and fat/carb grams to consume in a day based on an
estimated calorie need for weight loss and percentage of the diet from
either fat or carbs (depending on the diet you choose to follow).
This is all tracked on "The Daily Connection" worksheet. A food must
be converted to a dot "value" before it can be recorded, which can be done
using the food list booklet provided. It is filled with tables of
categorized food items, their serving sizes, and corresponding dot values.
It also has a table for converting information found on a food label.
The booklet guides the reader through
calculations for determining basic calorie needs using current weight
times a multiplier that takes into account physical activity and then
subtracting 500 kcals for weight-loss calorie level. This determines
the starting horizontal line on "The Daily Connection" worksheet.
The starting vertical line is determined by the goal for either fat or
carb grams to consume in a day. Suggestions are made for how to
spread these goals out between meals. I encourage the reader to
check out Roberta's Web site at
www.advantagediets.com for more specifics. There you can take a
quick tour of how to use this tool.
The booklet gives a quick overview of all the
things a client needs to think about when considering a long-term
weight-loss program. This includes using body mass index,
waist-to-hip ratio, carb counting, exercise, grocery shopping, portion
size, satiety/hunger ratings, food groups, water consumption,
blood-glucose target ranges, and more. Much of these can be tracked
on "The Daily Connection" worksheet.
The booklet provides good references for
choosing healthy meats and ranks foods within groups (in the food list
booklet) from low to high for calories, carbs, and fats.
I found Drawing the Line on Calories, Carbs,
and Fat a unique and novel approach to monitoring nutrient intake.
Most clients benefit when they are able to keep track of their food
choices for weight loss, blood-glucose control or general good nutrition.
Users also would need to have the conversion
guide with them most of the time until they become familiar with their
favorite foods; but this is no different than learning any new system.
I found the Daily Connection to be a bit busy and somewhat confusing to
navigate, until I studied it thoroughly and practiced it. The
diabetes guidelines in the book need to be modified to fit the client's
needs and expanded upon if using it as a part of diabetes education
sessions.
Overall the booklet is quite broad as it
touches on all the topics we normally would want to address with a client
who is interested in weight loss and healthy eating. It is flexible
in that it gives the option of focusing on either fat or carbs along with
the calories. It is good to have many tools to offer clients, and I
encourage you to check out the web site to determine if this is one to put
in your toolbox.
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Ventures (Nutrition Entrepreneurs) - Summer 2006 -
Volume XXIII,
Number 1
Reviewed by Victoria Shanta Retelny, RD, LD
An innovative, supped up food log system,
Drawing the Line on Calories, Carbs, and Fat is a powerful education
tool. We tout the benefit of writing down what you eat. The
author has taken it a step further by making it a visual experience.
This system allows for plotting daily intake on a dot matrix grid.
In a clear and comprehensive fashion, the manual covers basic nutrition,
cooking and recipe tips, gauging hunger/fullness cues, activity tracking
and more.
Complete with a pocketsize food list booklet,
foods are divided into categories and listed in alphabetical order.
Not only is the portable booklet used to convert the Nutrition Fact panel
information to the dot system, but it displays how to track exercise,
manage diabetic and very-low carb diets, and determine liquid measurement
equivalents. There is an initial time commitment to learn the
system. However, once you get the hang of it, it's no more
time-consuming than keeping a basic food log.
Victoria Shanta Retelny, RD, LD, NE's Chair
and Director of LivingWell
Communications, a nutrition communications consulting company in Chicago.
You can reach Victoria at
victoria@livingwellcommunications.com or 773-551-9882.
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Weight
Management - Summer 2006 - Volume 4, Number 1
Reviewed by Lisa Ronco, MS, RD, CDN
Chances are that if you are reading this, you
have had the pleasure of coaching a client through a diet or weight-loss
plan by using some type of food recording system. Maybe you have
taught a newly diagnosed diabetes patient how to keep track of his or her
calories and gram of carbohydrates. Now raise your hands if the
tracking method you used was easy...Not so many hands up? Did your
client have to drop that diet plan or the tracking system because it was
too strict and hard to follow? Was the client set up for the failure
from the start? Did he or she feel too restricted in food or calorie
choices? Was the daily food journal never completed? What is
the reason the plan was not followed? As the nutrition experts, we
may often feel frustrated when our clients are unable to adhere to the
recommendations we have created for them. Clients may fall short of
success for many reasons beyond our control, but our counseling and
education skills should not be the reason for the failure.
Wouldn't it be heaven if there were an
easy-to-use tool to teach clients to monitor calories, carbohydrates and
fat? Wouldn't it be fabulous if the same system could teach people
with diabetes about counting carbohydrates? And what if this system
allowed the user to be flexible in the tracking process?
Well, I am pleased to announce that one of our
own has developed a fantastic and easy-to-use tool for registered
dietitians (RDs) and our clients alike. Roberta Schwartz Wennik, MS,
RD, originally created Drawing the Line (back then she focused on
fat and cholesterol) as her master's thesis while a student at the
University of Washington. Her experience with the product was so
positive that she decided to patent the concept and publish a book.
Using Drawing the Line on Calories, Carbs
and Fat is quite simple. Each book comes with Daily Connection
sheets (the tracking sheet) where the user tracks the foods eaten and also
comes with a reference book listing the calorie, fat and carbohydrate
content of foods. The user is instructed to graph the foods he or
she eats - starting by placing a dot and then drawing a line to the next
food eaten, thereby connecting the dots. This is a unique approach
to the old food diary we often can't get our clients to record. As
Roberta says, "If you can count dots, you can draw the line." And
she is right. The system is quite simple to follow.
A client begins using the book by documenting
his or her height, weight, waist-to-hip ratio as well as BMI. The
book not only provides step-by-step instructions for calculating each, but
also the healthy rangers too. The next step is calculating calories
based on activity level. At this point the user decides whether to
follow a low-fat or low-carbohydrate diet and calculates the percentage of
calories from each macronutrient based upon how strict the user wishes the
plan to be.
Roberta provides step-by-step easy-to-follow
instructions for every part of the process. For example, if the user
is counting carbohydrates due to diabetes, pre-diabetes or because he or
she chooses to follow a low carbohydrate diet, Drawing the Line
allows the user a simple method to track carbohydrates, while also
providing a space for tracking blood-glucose measurements.
The book also teaches the user to become a
savvy supermarket shopper by reading labels and tracking that information.
Portion sizes, sugar and fat sources, healthy food options, as well as
many other nutrition tidbits are also thoroughly covered.
Does the system actually work the easy way
Roberta intended? Well, I asked myself the same question and set
forth my own experiment. Using myself, I determined my caloric goal
and decided to try the low carbohydrate approach. The food list made
selecting food choices easy. Tracking my choices also made me
realize my popcorn addiction was adding up. After a few days of
using the Daily Connection, I felt confident in my food selections and was
able to actually stick to and track my low-carbohydrate diet plan.
Knowing that I can track and maintain the
Daily Connection tracking system makes me feel secure in recommending the
system for my clients. Now if only balancing my check book was this
easy!
Lisa works with the HIVAIDS population at
Village Center for Care in
New York City where she is also a fitness instructor and personal trainer.
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pressbox.co.uk
Drawing the Line on Calories, Carbs, and Fat™
Joins With the FDA to Say “Calories Count”
Tue Feb 28 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEATTLE — It’s coming up on the second anniversary of the FDA’s unveiling of their “Calories Count” campaign to help reduce obesity in the United States. The question is — Has it made a difference? Advantage Diets with it patented connect-the-dots weight-loss system, “Drawing the Line on Calories, Carbs, and Fat”, believes that both the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have fallen short of giving the more than 64% of Americans who are overweight the tools to make the necessary changes. These Americans risk heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancers if they don’t lose the weight.
In a press release on March 12, 2004, the FDA quoted Secretary Thomson of the HHS as saying, "Counting calories is critical for people trying to achieve and maintain a healthy weight." Even though the FDA plans to require food manufacturers to give more prominence to calories on the food label—that hasn’t happened yet. In the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, HHS has emphasized the need for reduction of calorie consumption and the increase of physical activity. However, the guidelines haven’t provided a means for people to do what Secretary Thomson said they need to do—count calories.
“Drawing the Line” bridges the gap between the HHS telling people that calories count and getting people to actually count calories. This patented system shows people how to easily cut the calories eaten and increase the calories burned. Users decide whether they want to concentrate on reducing carbs or reducing fat. The best part is that it allows the users to individualize their eating plan.
It’s fun to do. Drawing lines over a matrix of dots allows users to create a picture of what they eat during the day. It’s nothing like the boring and tedious calorie counting systems that were popular in the 1970s. No wonder people gave the old way up so quickly. Users can have their favorite foods because they can see how they fit in a total day’s intake. Even children can draw the line. Considering that about 15% of children and adolescents from ages 6 to 19 are overweight, this might just be the answer for them. It will teach them about the foods they should eat.
To find out more about Drawing the Line on Calories, Carbs, and Fat, just visit www.advantagediets.com or call 425-778-1340.
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