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Excerpt
Introduction
With The California Wine Country Diet, I find
myself coming full circle to the excitement I found in food during my
childhood. Like many people, as I moved into adulthood, my relationship
with food became conflicted. I started to feel that I had to watch
everything I ate and give up the foods I most loved if I wanted to be
thin and fit. But as a child, I don’t remember ever thinking about
calories or even knowing anyone who was on a diet. From my perspective
today, I can see that some of the foods I ate as a child were not the
most nutritious. As John Ash points out in the Foreword, it was the
1950s and we were falling in love with TV dinners. What I do remember
was that food was fun. I remember with delight getting to eat all the
meringues I wanted by candle light when a storm cancelled my parents’
dinner party. I remember the laughter we shared when my sisters and I
competed to see who could prepare the best dinner.
Moreover, my father was a gourmet cook and vice
president of General Foods in charge of research and development, so he
played a key role in developing all the new convenience foods I, and I
am sure many of you, grew to love. Most nights he would bring home an
interesting, new food for us to taste test. One night it might be birds’
nest soup, and another it might be dehydrated steak that was being
tested for use by astronauts. I prided myself on being willing to try
any new food.
Leaving home, my food preferences changed. When I moved
to the mountains of Mendocino County, California, in the 1970s, I
developed a strong interest in what was then known as “health foods.”
Later, when I moved to Los Angeles to attend graduate school at the
University of Southern California, I encountered for the first time the
culture of thinness. I decided that I weighed too much and went on my
first diet. I lost ten pounds and kept it off during my busy single
years. But the struggle with food and diet returned as I approached my
late thirties. Even though I kept busy as a wife, mother, homeowner,
administrator, and therapist, I found that I was gaining weight and it
was harder to take it off or keep it off.
In 1985, I became an administrator at Mt. Diablo
Hospital in Concord, California in charge of the eating disorders and
diet and exercise programs. In the next few years I developed a number
of other weight-loss programs and provided the psychological support for
people following those programs and just about every other program you
can imagine, from protein-sparing modified fasts to Weight Watchers to
Atkins. All these programs worked in helping people lose weight. The
failure came in maintaining that loss over time. As people slowly
regained the weight they had worked so hard to lose, they felt
discouraged, experienced low self-esteem, and complained of the adverse
physical effects of large weight fluctuations.
Spending all my days listening to people worry about
their weight, I finally decided just not to think about my own. That
solution may have taken some psychological pressure off of me, but it
did not help me maintain my weight. Getting older and spending eight
hours a day sitting listening to patients, I found the numbers on my
scale just kept going up.
A few years ago, while in the process of writing my
first book, Choosing to Be Well, I finally came to accept that if
I was going to be in the best health possible, I had to reach and
maintain a healthy weight. The California Wine Country Diet is
the result of that promise to myself and of my twenty years of working
with and researching weight issues. I know that this program works, not
just because of the research it is based upon and the experience of my
patients, but because it has laid the foundation for my own thirty-pound
weight loss and maintenance. How glorious it is to wake up each morning
feeling vital and twenty years younger in my body!
What’s my secret? It is multifaceted, as you will read
in this book. But it starts with giving up on the notion that you have
to deny yourself the pleasures of food in order to be happy with your
weight and body image. Restoring a pleasurable relationship with food is
at the heart of The California Wine Country Diet. In addition,
especially as we age, we need to be vigilant about our nutrition, the
portion sizes of what we eat, and getting enough physical activity.
Weight can slowly go up with as little as an extra 100 calories a day. I
will show you a variety of ways to make sure you are getting the
nutrition your body needs, to monitor your food intake, and to develop a
more active lifestyle.
But perhaps the most important aspect of my
program is its attention to our emotional relationship with food. Being
honest with yourself about your eating patterns and food preferences is
essential to changing from eating habits that add to your weight to
habits that are conducive to weight loss. Most diets neglect the
emotional aspects of eating, and many books on the emotional aspects of
eating view them as problems to be overcome. We all need to face the
reality that foods and beverages, including wine, are major aspects of
our emotional and social lives!
This book will teach you how to enjoy the art of “conscious
indulgence.” You will learn to combine “conscious” attention to your
nutrition, portions, and physical activity with the pleasures of
“indulgence” in the foods and life experiences you love. Conscious
indulgence is the key to preventing the rebellion and discouragement
that usually results from dieting. Conscious indulgence creates the
balance that is essential for long-term weight management.
The California Wine Country Diet is an
innovative approach to weight management that succeeds because it meets
our most basic nutritional and emotional needs in a proactive way. The
food of the California Wine Country Diet is not some powder made up in a
factory or bland celery and raw carrots. This diet will introduce you to
the delicious foods of “California cuisine.” You will also be able to
eat any other foods you want, albeit in smaller portions. This program
will challenge you to examine your reliance on processed foods and to
begin to explore the fresh produce available at local farmers’ markets,
organic groceries, and many supermarkets. By embarking on The
California Wine Country Diet, not only will you find it much easier
to succeed in reaching your goal weight and maintaining it, but you also
will be improving your own health and supporting the well-being of our
natural environment through your food selections. |
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