The Sonoma Diet

Heres a diet just perfect for a spring and early summer weight losing spree!
One of the newly popular Mediterranean style diet plans, the Sonoma Diet concentrates on letting you eat appetising, healthy foods while cutting down on calories without restricting food groups.

As in most diets based on continental eating habits, the Sonoma diet is strong on olive oil, which is used as the oil of choice in salad dressing and cooking because of its heart healthy properties. Grapes are also a key food, and contribute their strong antioxidant qualities as fruit or fermented into wine.

In fact this is one of the few diets that allows alcohol consumption in moderation, following the well known findings that traditional Mediterranean diets including daily wine consumption result in lowered incidence of heart disease. Other recommended foods, called 'power foods' are bell peppers, almonds, blueberries, broccoli, spinach, strawberries, tomatoes and whole grains.

The diet, which is named after the Californian Sonoma valley which is the home of the author, Connie Gutterson, emphasises a change in attitude towards common foods. The first week is dedicated to a cleaning out phase, in which dieters are encouraged to throw out all the white sugar based and trans-fats containing foods, and replace them with whole grains and olive oil based foods.
By the way, trans-fats are fats created from oil which have many of the properties of saturated animal fats and are suspected of being cancer causing as well, so well done Sonoma Diet on that point!

After starting with a 'first wave' lasting ten days, in which carbohydrates are cut back quite strictly and fruit off limits completely, the diet settles down to a more sensible regime of lean meats, plenty of vegetables and fruits and carbohydrates from whole grains, with portion size controlled by plate size, which makes it much easier than calorie counting and arrives at about the same results.
This second wave can be followed indefinitely, until enough weight has been lost at a fairly leisurely and healthy pace, giving enough time to get used to the long term food choices that should be continued afterwards. The final phase is adding back enough wholemeal bread, grains and beans to keep weight stable.

This is one of the saner diets available, and will almost certainly result in healthy weight loss and improvement in most peoples BMI, although of course everyone should consult their doctor before starting any diet. This is really an attempt to re-educate Americans to return to more natural and normal eating patterns which have been forgotten in the last generation.
If the Sonoma diet is combined with a sensible exercise program of walking or other moderate exercise, it could really be a successful and quite enlightened program, and certainly isnt a fad diet.

On the other hand, the recipes recommended in the book are both time consuming and quite expensive, which means that a lot of people will be put off. So I would recommend taking the dietary advice and finding easier and cheaper recipes elsewhere, which shouldnt be too hard.