My DASH diet planner

22/09/2015 by UKMA 53 Comments

Fair warning – I am not planning on adding this as a download, as it really is useless unless you buy this book. I did buy it and read it and love it.  In the past, when I have been successful in dieting it has been down to cutting out carbs and most fruit. We have always eaten a ton of veg and lentils, black beans, white bean mash, but far too much meat.  This version of DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) doesn’t cut out any one food group.  It seems like a plan that is sustainable.  But making sure I am getting everything I need while not overdoing things in certain areas was always going to take some planning and attention.  So I created my own personal planner that has the bits in it I need. I have been using it (since yesterday when I began the Phase one diet properly) and so far it IS helping to keep me on track.  I was happy to share it on the FB Support group (kindly linked to me in a comment by follower Bridget) because the folks there have the book and can make use of the very specific info – and won’t be misled by the abbreviated info in the charts.

But if you are following a specific diet, you might consider making one of these for yourself.  Just the making of it helped me a lot! Because I have a Filofax style planner, I first made them to print and slice down the middle like my other planner pages:

This is the serving checklist – basically a prettier version of what is in the book

I also made a sheet that tracks my weight, blood sugar level and activity – this is the first version, the final one includes tick boxes for water consumption.

I also did a sheet that highlights many of the meal suggestions for the Phase One portion.  I figure by Phase Two I’ll have a better grip on it.  Plus it is too hard to squeeze as much info as I would need in a small sheet LOL!  I have the book to refer to.

The tick boxes are so I can keep track of how many times I have a particular meal over the week.  Phase One is only two weeks so this sheet is only useful for a limited time. There is a Phase Two serving checklist too, that will become the bulk of the planner over time.

But it also occurred to me that many people won’t have a planner.  And aren’t going to be keen to buy one just for tracking their diet.  So I re-jigged the layout so the sheets can be printed on an A4 or US letter sheet, sideways, and used in a standard 3-ring (or 4-ring) binder.

I was lazy and cheap and printed these on printer paper, standard quality, hence the colour difference.

What I did notice in that process is that the meant-to-be-cut pages won’t work in a binder like this – the sheets are flip-flopped, so the MON-WED days are on the RIGHT rather than the left.  Of COURSE it wasn’t going to be easy.  But hey ho.

I feel lucky that I have the skill (sort of)  to customize a personalized planner for specifically what I need to plan for.  And it makes me realize why I found it so hard to create a “generic” planner for OTHER people to use.  Everyone has their own ideas of what a planner needs.  I remember back when we used NeXT computers, post-PC, pre-Mac.  There was an object-oriented programming tool that let you group individual bits of code just the way YOU needed to, to build a program without starting from a blank screen.  It fascinated me, and made so much sense.  Wouldn’t it be totally cool if you had little building blocks for a planner that you could drag onto a properly sized blank page, and its reverse,  to create your own customized version? And change the colour or font with a click? Then just send it to your printer and BAM! WHAT? Prefect planner!

Ah, dream on….