A companion to her bestseller “”The Dorm Room Diet,”” Daphne Oz’s “”Planner”” is a more interactive guide to maintaining healthy eating habits. Oz, who is still a student herself, identifies many of the different ways that people might fall back into bad habits, including snacking at parties and comfort eating with new friends. “”The Planner”” is therefore quite handy for anyone worried about gaining the infamous freshman fifteen as the tips included are targeted specifically at those at college who must now, away from protective mothers, control their own eating habits.
Oz tackles each section of a healthy lifestyle separately, covering food groups, portioning, exercises and temptations. While the information provided is, no doubt, all pertinent to a well-balanced diet, much of it seems like simple common sense, and other parts seem to forget that this is a student population. Oz seems to assume that the U-Mart will stock flaxseed oil, figs, turnips and kale (whatever that is).
The exercises outlined in the “”Planner”” are nothing new. If you need a paragraph explaining how to do a lunge, then perhaps a more serious exercise manual is in order. However, the way that Oz groups exercise by body area, with legs, chest, back, abdominal and more, makes it easy to make your own complete workout, changing easily from one move to the next and tackling an area with a variety of stretches before moving on.
This diet is not one of the new fancy diets where you can eat bread, cookies or your own weight in bacon. It is a diet of simple good sense.
The strength of the “”Planner”” lies in the many spaces provided for your own progress. With a quiz at the start to place your eating style, the book then urges you to fill in what you eat, how much, when, where, how many of each exercise you do, and finally provides thirty day worth of journal to record triumphs and failings. Though this could all be recorded in a notebook, having the little black lines fill up is probably enough to motivate some readers to actually follow the diet.
“”The Dorm Room Diet Planner”” is a nice reminder for those already motivated to keep eating habits in check, but fills rather a lot of pages with information that you already know. For the same price, you could buy a fancy leather journal and really enjoy the act of recording your progress, which is all the “”Planner”” has to offer.
