Greetings!
You are here as part of the lifestyle modification arm of the knee osteoarthritis study being conducted by the Fowler-Kennedy Sports Medicine clinic.
Over the next ~12 weeks, you will be guided through a number of the key nutrition habits that help people lose weight and, more importantly, maintain that weight loss over the long-haul.
Before we begin, please review this quick FAQ that will help you better understand the program.
The program is divided into a “lesson-a-day” format spanning 8 modules, each lasting 1-2 weeks. Each module centers around a diet behavior we’d like you to focus on and practice.
As a gentle reminder of the need to practice these behaviours consistently, every day you will receive a short email reminder highlighting that day’s lesson and redirecting you back to the site to view the lesson in detail, as well as complete your daily log (if you choose that logging option).
Once you’ve completed a lesson, simply hit the Mark Complete button to save your progress. This will also allow you to move onto the next lesson.
Although the course is laid out as a lesson-a-day, you are free to move through the material at the pace that best suits your learning style.
There’s an old saying, “That what gets measured, gets improved” and this is definitely true when it come to tracking compliance and accountability to a diet program.
As a target, we are aiming to be 90% compliant with healthy eating behaviours as we move forward. This means if you typically eat 5x/day, then you can be off your program a maximum of 3x/week.
However, unlike previous diets that may have required you to diligently track any and all calories you consumed, due to the varied nature of the participants in this program, we aim to make the logging as painless as possible.
To that end, we’ve created two options:
- Daily Progress Tracker (link in sidebar and also in top menu)
- Weekly Recap (link in sidebar and also in top menu)
Taking advantage of one or both of these tools is going to be an essential component of your success moving forward and you’ll be able to monitor all of your submissions through your Adherence Calendar.
Most of our participants use the Weekly Recap, but you are free to use whichever approach that best suits you. Some participants even find that detailed diet logging improves their compliance, so we’ve listed several diet trackers in the top menu that we enjoy, but the key is to regularly log!
Communicating with us through the Weekly Recap is also how we’ll be able to help customize the program to best suit your unique dietary challenges.
If the diet behaviour in a given module is already one you practice consistently, great! Keep it up and you’ll start to see more success once we introduce additional behaviours.
Conversely, don’t fret if one of the behaviours we introduce ultimately doesn’t fit with your lifestyle or preferred approach to eating. We’ve have clients in the past make huge changes in their health and body composition only by implementing 2-3 of the behaviours.
The key is finding those behaviours that provide you the biggest bang for you buck and making sure you stay consistent with them.
The program is designed to teach you how to build a sustainable and customized approach to eating that will allow you to manage weight effectively for the rest of your life, but we realize that some people want results faster or like to be told explicitly what to do.
If that sounds like you, we’ve loaded a 1600 kcal meal plan (suitable for females) and a 20o0 kcal meal plan (suitable for males) in our resources section. You’ll also find an electronic copy of our recipe guide there as well.