| One of the Most Underutilized Clinical Tools Available: The Diet Diary |
01.11.12 12:00:00 |
Video Transcript:
Hi. I’m Dr. Christopher Mote, and today I’d like to have a clinical conversation with you regarding diet diaries, one of the more useful things in a doctor’s tool kit, and probably underutilized.
I’d like to encourage you today that this can be one of the more practical tools you could use to help patients make lifestyle change. And here’s why I think it’s so useful. The first time I ask a patient to fill out a diet diary, my immediate reaction is something that I look at. If they have any hesitation, then I start to watch for signs that the patient isn’t fully compliant with everything I’m asking them to do.
Frankly, we ask these patients to make changes, and if they don’t, they’re not gonna see the success they want. And the first way to find that out is to ask them to fill out a seven-day diet diary. Patients who do that, you know they show up. They have not only a participation but a commitment to the process.
Secondly, if you’ve ever asked somebody to describe what they ate over the last week, you know that can be somewhat painful. Patients don’t always recollect what they ate, and listening to it is not always so useful. So, I ask patients to put it down. It becomes a very useful tool then for me to very quickly see and do a visual diagnosis of glycemic disorders, people who are skipping meals, high inflammatory food intake like gluten or dairy, and you see it at a glance.
And lastly, it becomes a tool to help patients understand how what they do completely affects and influences how they feel. So you can show them in their diet diary – and it’s part of it. They even have a symptom log – and correlate what they’re eating with how they feel.
Now, it’s very simple to do this. All it takes is a form, and we have one in the Physician’s Road Map that you can copy for yourself and for your patient. You hand it to them and ask them to bring it back for their first or their subsequent appointment.
When they hand it to you, I take – and I suggest you take – a couple of markers, and first just go through and put a slash mark wherever they haven’t eaten. If they’ve skipped a meal or they’ve gone too long between meals. You can very quickly make a hash mark and then show that to them. “Look, did you realize that every time you chose not to eat, you just raised your stress level? And those are the stressors that you can immediately change.”
The second thing you could do is you could take another highlighter – a different color – and highlight any of the foods that you find to be problematic for this patient, whether it be gluten or dairy or anything that may be a food allergen for them.
So I find that the diet diary is a quick way for me to see what the patient is eating, a quick way to gauge their level of engagement, and then a really quick way for me to turn around and teach the patient how to make the change that they need to get healthy again.
I strongly recommend you consider them, and, again, you can get one in the appendix section of the Physician Road Map.