Martha Stewart’s magazine gave us a thumbs up! Version 1.7 is packed with features, like the ability to email a .pdf file of your journal to yourself, or anyone else interested in your mindful eating habits. Thanks to everyone for their input!

Thanks to a combination of our 1.5 update and Apple’s OS update to 4.2.1, the memory leak that caused the occasional calendar blank out should be resolved. If anyone is still experiencing this, please let us know. Thanks and enjoy a mindful holiday!

Some users may experience an occasional glitch in the calendar display where the calendar does not show.  We are working on a bug fix. The work around at this time is to completely shut down and restart the app. In the latest OS versions the app continues to run in a background mode. These are the instructions for fully shutting down the app:

1. start at the home screen
2. double tap the home button
3. scroll to the mindful eating app.
4. touch and hold the app icon until it starts to wiggle.
5. touch the minus icon to close the app
6. hit the home button two (not a double tap) times to get to home screen.
7. restart the app

The calendar should work again.

You can find more detailed instructions here:

http://www.mwd.com/2010/06/iphone-ios4-how-to-use/

http://views.washingtonpost.com/on-success/woman-warrior/2010/07/over_the_past_six_months.html

Thanks to everyone that has written in with suggestions. The feedback has all been very helpful! We’ve fixed two reported bugs and added a free ebook titled “Diet Shock” under the More tab. The premise of the ebook is that all popular “diets” work in the beginning; from the cabbage soup diet to the zone diet, and all “diets” eventually stop working.  The book explores what all diets have in common and why they all stop working. It explains why a mindful approach is the best approach. Here is an excerpt from the Diet Shock book:

There is another important reason that all diets work in the beginning. The break in routine forces you to pay much more attention to what you eat. Most of us think we love our food, but in fact we take it for granted. We eat while watching TV, at our computers, driving our cars or working. We barely notice what our food tastes like and only realize we are done eating when we feel the pressure at our beltline.

We spend less money and time on our food than any generation in history but we have easy access to a variety of nutritious foods that the kings of even 100 years ago couldn’t have imagined: fresh fruit from the tropics, vegetables year round, seafood 1000 miles inland, and culinary specialties from every corner of the globe.

The Diet Shock ebook is meant to both give some unique perspectives into dieting and to help keep you motivated.

Keep the feedback coming!

Based on user feedback, several usability and readability issues were improved. The app now supports  email logs. This was requested by a user to allow the journal to be emailed to his doctor. This app is continuing to evolve and improve. Thanks to everyone who has emailed suggestions or comments. Please keep them coming!

Welcome to ViaLean.com the home of the Mindful Eating App. This iPhone app is designed to be a daily food experience journal that helps build mindful habits over time.

Food journaling simply works. Journaling has long been suggested as a disciplined approach to dieting. It’s a very powerful tool to build awareness. As it turns out, awareness is far more powerful than any diet and it may be the journaling that makes any diet effective rather than the diet itself. Journaling encourages focus and builds habits. Focus and awareness are the heart of the mindful eating approach.

This app strips away the diets and calorie counting and concentrates on easy tools that foster healthy habits and build awareness over time. The app can be used with any diet program and will enhance it significantly but over time you’ll prove to yourself that it’s really the process and not the program that makes results; the process of building a heightened relationship with both food and with your body.