WOODSTOCK — Members of the Dixfield and Woodstock Seventh-day Adventist churches gathered Sunday evening for a graduation ceremony, celebrating their completion of a monthlong diet that promoted healthy foods and exercise.

Penny Dennison of Mexico, who attends the Dixfield Seventh-day Adventist Church, said members of that church and the Woodstock church at Bryant Pond decided in 2012 to participate in the Complete Health Improvement Program, a program where participants “eat healthy foods, cut out processed foods and exercise more.”

“It’s a global organization that originated as a grass-roots organization in California,” Dennison said. “Many of us at Dixfield Seventh-day Adventist took the opportunity to give the program a shot, to get us in better health and to share the information with members of our community.”

Dennison said that in October, she and a small group drove to Georgia, where they participated in a three-day training program that taught them how CHIP worked and how they could use it to improve their health.

“When I first heard about the program and how you have to cut out the processed foods and focus on eating grown foods, I was worried,” Dennison said. “A lot of us were thinking, ‘How are we going to cut all of this from our diet?’”

Members of the Dixfield and Woodstock churches decided to start their own CHIP groups as a means of testing out the program before recommending it to others.

“We took it upon ourselves to try it before telling others to try it,” Dennison said. “We started on April 3 and finished on May 6. As it turns out, we all had a lot of fun doing it.”

Dennison said that of the 21 individuals who participated in the program, 19 reported weight loss. She added that the cumulative loss of weight by the 21 participants was 150 pounds.

One thing that Dennison described as “surprising” was the fact that nobody went hungry while doing it.

“On this particular diet, we were allowed to eat fruits, veggies, legumes and whole grains,” Dennison said. “A lot of us thought that we would struggle to fill ourselves, but nobody had to limit what they ate. Nobody went hungry.”

Dennison said one participant was able to lower his cholesterol from 203 to 139, a 41.5 percent decline, while another participant was able to lose 11.38 percent of her body weight.

In the exercise portion of the program, Dennison said there was a contest between the two church groups. Woodstock members walked a total of 1,750 miles in a month and Dixfield members walked 1,839 miles, for a total of 3,589 miles.

“A lot of us who participated in the program are older folks,” Dennison said. “We had to decide if we we wanted to be sick old people or healthy old people. The idea is to not make this sound impossible, but instead make it look possible.”

Dennison said she is hoping the Dixfield and Woodstock churches can do the diet again later in the year, and she hopes to attract more people to it.

“We hope to reach out and get more people in the community to participate,” Dennison said. “Now they we’ve tried it, we want to try to get more people involved.”

mdaigle@sunjournal.com

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