I've used this journal for three weeks now, in conjunction with the Mayo Clinic Diet book. It is very closely keyed to the diet outlined in the main book and is not much use without that (with one big exception, under "Pros" below). It contains no information about the diet itself - you'll need the book for that.
Pros: 1. It does exactly follow the outlined two weeks "Lose It!" and eight weeks "Live It!" plan of the main book, with charts and tables that make it easy to track how you are doing with the diet, habit changes, and physical activity recommendations.
2. It has review pages at the end of the first two weeks and each week thereafter that enable you to evaluate your progress frequently.
3. The most useful feature is a graphic on each day's pages for the "Live It!" section that allows you to track your consumption of food from each category in the diet by simply checking off circles in a pyramid-shaped graph, that also visually reminds you of the diet's emphasis on vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. This is the easiest way I have ever seen of tracking so-called "exchanges" and this feature would also be very helpful to a diabetic trying to track a prescribed exchange-based diet for the first time. The line-by-line entries for the food log in the "Live It!" section have columns for each exchange as well, showing you item by item what you're eating. This is my favorite thing about the journal.
Cons: 1. It only has ten weeks worth of entries, and two weeks of those are for the initial very restricted "Lose It!" program, without the helpful tracking graphics for the exchanges. For many people, it's going to take longer, sometimes a lot longer, than ten weeks to reach a weight loss goal.
2. The initial two week period has limited space for recording food eaten, forcing simplification or even just leaving out some things - which defeats the purpose of a food journal.
3. There are some recipes included during the eight week detailed section, but, very puzzlingly, they simply list the recipe without telling you the number of portions it makes! Some are clearly one portion recipes while others are at least four, maybe even six or eight. While it's possible to figure out what a portion would be, a diet journal that tries to help you track what you eat should certainly give number of portions in its recipes.
4. The binding opens easily but can't be turned back on itself, so it's a bit annoying to use. You can lay it flat, but you can't fold it around, and for many of the pages that would have helped.
This does help you follow the diet plan recommended in the main book, but if you buy it, realize that you may be able to do about as well tracking things on your own with an inexpensive spiral bound notebook from the dollar store. And if you plan to stay on this diet for a while that's what you'll have to do when this one runs out. Don't plan on photocopying it - like many proprietary, copyrighted journals of this nature, it is printed in green ink that photocopies very poorly, if at all. If you want to simplify your record keeping for the main Mayo Clinic Diet book, this will help you do that - at least for the first ten weeks. But it gives you very little that you couldn't come up with yourself, with the exception of a few recipes that, unfortunately, because of their lack of a listing for number of portions each recipe makes, are more confusing than helpufl.
