Weight Loss & Nutrition
Counseling Materials
To ensure you are learning through your counseling, we have developed a comprehensive set of materials that will accompany you through your time with us. You will use these materials during nutrition counseling meetings, and throughout the 167 hours of the week when you are not meeting with your nutritionist.
Our program materials will assist you in various ways:
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To help you develop a working knowledge of key nutrition tenants and core nutrition principles
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To actively guide you through building your meals and controlling portion size
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To help you choose healthy and nutritious dishes when eating out at restaurants of any ethnicity
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To provide you with nutritious recipes to make at home
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To monitor your ongoing weight loss and progress
Nutrition Guide
What It Is: The Nutrition Guide provides the science behind our nutrition counseling and weight loss methodology. Content includes:
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Classification and purpose of the major macro-nutrients
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Definition and nutritional benefit of each food group
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Starches, Fruits, Vegetables, Proteins, Fats, Dairy
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General weight loss timelines
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Academic research and guidelines regarding meal timing, portion sizes and other weight loss hot topics
Why It's Helpful: We want you to be an informed and active participant in your weight loss journey. Through education, we believe that you will be able to make better ongoing meal and snack choices and improve habits to support a more nutritious lifestyle.
How You Use It: You receive the Nutrition Guide when you sign up. We ask that you read it before your first weekly meeting with a nutrition counselor, and we hope that you will continue to reference it as you move through your weight loss program.
Complete Food Guide
What It Is: Based upon Diabetic Exchange standards, the Complete Food Guide lists the proper portion size for foods within each food group. Our nutrition counselors believe that portion size is a key ingredient to weight loss. This pocket size document is portable for cooking in or eating out at restaurants. The document also lists the general macro-nutrient breakdown for each category.
Why It's Helpful: Part of learning about nutrition is understanding which foods fit within each food group, and using this knowledge to structure and plan your meals. Building this working nutrition knowledge helps you solidify what your nutrition map for weight loss looks like.
How You Use It: During your twice weekly meeting with a nutrition counselor, you will plan out your days by food group. As you pick meals everyday, you will reference this document to see what your options are within each category. Mix-and-match your options to add variety to your meals and keep your weight loss on track.
Recipe Database
What It Is: The Recipe Database contains healthy and quick recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for people on both normal and restricted diets. Each recipe includes a breakdown of ingredients to help incorporate the meal into their daily plans.
Why It's Helpful: Perhaps you need a bit of inspiration. Our nutrition counselors have tailored each recipe to align with each food group and proper portion size. The meals are designed to be both nutritious and easy to make. Using these recipes promotes weight loss because a nutrition counselor has substituted poor ingredients with more nutritious options.
How You Use It: Select which meal you need to eat, flip to that page, and pick something that
looks delicious! We hope that this document will help you build a repository of healthy options to promote your weight loss and weight maintenance. We regularly add new recipes that successful clients submit to us so that their weight loss helps encourage yours!
Meal Planning Guides
What It Is: The Meal Planning Guide is a template that clients use to plan their daily meals and snacks.
Why It's Helpful: Comparing planned meal composition with what client actually ate drives each meeting with a nutrition counselor. A nutrition counselor reviews each log to make helpful recommendations on how each client can improve their nutrition habits and overcome their nutrition challenges. The document also provides an effective way to monitor weight loss over time. While logging food may sound tedious at first, it helps uncover hard-to-spot eating and nutrition patterns for each client. From this starting point, a nutrition counselor can continue to tailor the client's plan to promote optimal progress and/or weight loss. The document provides insights about how each person relates to food. Seeing this information visually also helps clients keep their weight loss in perspective and helps them envision what the duration of the weight loss process and weight maintenance will look like.
How You Use It: Each week review your nutrition counselor's recommendations to build a successful plan.
