Thank You! Thank you for submitting your question.  Our chief dietitian, Carolyn Classick-Kohn,MS,RD reads each e-mail sent to PersonalDiets, but due to the volume of mail she receives, not all questions can be answered personally. Please read some of Carolyn's recent responses in the right column below or feel free to use PersonalDiets' Search for additional information.

If improving health and body weight is important to you it should be at the top of your “to do” list every day, but is it?

If you are like most people, every day is filled with “have tos” at work, at school, and at home. Your “to do” list is longer than the day allows, and you’re probably doing many things at once. And, if you’re not getting an average of 7.5 hours of sleep, you are getting through the day sleep-deprived, so you’re not functioning as well as you could. Many people eat haphazardly, eating whatever is handy or convenient at the time. So your diet and exercise goals get put on the “back burner” where they remain, day after day.

Changing your eating habits and getting in shape are long term goals, and like most long term goals, they’re important, but not “urgent”. Often daily, less important, but more “urgent” tasks get in the way of accomplishing them. Most of us are really good about getting the daily things done (doing homework, doing errands, etc.). But pretty soon, a year goes by and we are no closer to the important life goal, no matter how important it was, or still is.

We have found that many people find typical diets just add to the problem because they lack the flexibility to meet the hectic and busy schedules most people have. So, everything starts out well for a few weeks and then life gets in the way!

If you're in a situation where you feel unwilling or unable to focus on your food choices, PersonalDiets offers incorporates several ways to help you reach your personal health and weight goals. In the beginning of any diet plan you’re building focus and commitment, so it helps to have a structured meal plan because all do is follow it. So, you have a meal plan option at PersonalDiets to get things started. The meal plan option is where most diet plans stop (probably why people don’t last on diets) without offering any plans or strategies for incorporating healthy food choices into “real” life situations. But that’s just the beginning at Personal Diet.

• Get control over your personal diet habits!

• Use your recipes (or ours)
   

• Choose Dieting Foods or your non dieting favorites!
   

• Diet more naturally

  • Include foods you already eat!

  • Eat at home; at work, at restaurants; wherever!

  

Where PersonalDiets excels is going beyond a meal plan design and giving you a program to build a new way of eating into your busy life. Since most people can’t predict where and when they will eat each meal every day, we increase the flexibility of your diet so that you can choose all your own foods meal by meal as you go throughout your day. You’ll learn how to select foods from your personal guidelines so that you stay on goal without having to follow a pre-set meal plan – we find that this works very well for busy people. And unlike most online programs, we also give you simple and fast ways to keep track your diet and exercise (both online and off-line) so that you know how you’re doing and what changes you can make even when you don’t have access to your computer.

Bring your goals and PersonalDiets will give you the plan to reach them with a realistic diet plan that fits your busy life!