May Your Days be Merry & Light: Healthy Holiday Eating

This wonderful festive season brings lots of opportunities to overindulge. You can avoid a New Year of regret if you take stock right now.

This series of Tips to Make Your Holidays Merry & Light started Saturday.

Diet Tip 4: Wouldn’t You Love to be a Gourmand Too?

Wouldn’t you love to be able to eat whatever your little heart desired? Wouldn’t you love to be able to truly enjoy your food, rather than be in a battle with it? Wouldn’t you love to not feel guilty about every bite you put into your mouth – either during or after?

Then you need to know about the Sonoma Diet.

When I first read The Sonoma Diet book, I realized: 1. I should have written this book; and 2. this is, more or less, the eating plan I have been following successfully for the past 20 years!

Though Connie Guttersen, R.D., Ph.D. titled her very popular book, The Sonoma Diet, I just hate to put it in the diet book category.

Ladies’ Home Journal dubbed it “The Food Lovers’ Diet”, which I find more apt.

Guttersen herself calls it “a celebration of food. There are no foods that you're not going to be able to have on this diet. It's a lifestyle.

The Sonoma Diet isn't about deprivation.

It's a celebration of foods that becomes a way of eating for life. You don't want to go back to what you were doing before.”

Now there is a website for the Sonoma Diet as well. Here you’ll find all kinds of tips and support to get you through the diet part to the maintenance level – which is a very enjoyable place to be.

Here are some Mediterranean-style recipes to get you started.

Tags: cravings, enjoy your food, holiday diet tips, avoid holiday weight gain, eat healthy for life, The Sonoma Diet

[Image Credit: Print Shop 23 Art Gallery]