The California Wine Country Diet: The Indulgent Approach to Managing Your Weight [Hardcover]

Haven Logan (Author), Sharon Stewart (Author), John Ash (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2005

The California Wine Country Diet: The Indulgent Approach to Managing Your Weight makes choosing wellness a pleasure. Readers learn how to lose and maintain weight while enjoying the delicious, healthy cuisine of the California wine country. In this diet, wine is not a footnote but an integral part of the daily meal plans for those who choose to drink wine.
While sampling recipes from some of California's most renowned chefs, readers will also learn how to deal with the complex emotional issues which may have sabotaged their weight loss attempts in the past. The nutritional and exercise recommendations of the new USDA Guidelines are presented in an easy-to-understand manner and in the context of wine country delights. From being just a way to lose weight, The California Wine Country Diet will easily become the lifestyle readers will choose.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If you love the Wine Country and love reading about it, this is the diet book for you." -- The San Jose Mercury News

"People think wine and sumptuous food cannot be a daily part of their lives. But they can, as Dr. Logan teaches." -- John Ash, author of the James Beard Foundation Award-winning John Ash: Cooking One-on-One

"This is a guide for everyone no matter where you live. Cheers!" -- Joanne Weir, author of Weir Cooking in the City

From the Publisher

Foreword by author and chef John Ash, known as one of America's most talented chefs and a guiding force in California cuisine.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Quill Driver Books; First Edition edition (October 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884956483
• ISBN-13: 978-1884956485
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,584,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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.

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 were 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 my self 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!

My educational background includes a B.A. in sociology from Barnard College at Columbia University, a masters degree in education from Bank Street College of Education, a masters degree in social work from the University of Southern California,and a Ph.D. in psychology from International College. As a psychotherapist and program director I have specialized in the treatment of eating disorders and weight management for over 20 years. I have spoken about these subjects to hundreds of groups, as well as, on radio and television.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Joys of Dieting, December 5, 2005

By 

Peter C. Tidy "Craig" (Petersburg, Va.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The California Wine Country Diet: The Indulgent Approach to Managing Your Weight (Hardcover)

The passions of the gourmet come with these inevitable consequences: Expanding waistline,unwearable wardrobe, self accusatory glances in the full length and the unease that accompanies your old college buddie's greeting of 'My you're looking well... (fed?)"
Now comes a book with the compelling combination of the words 'wine' and 'diet' in the title. Well reported it is that French men and women maintain their sylph like figures whilst consuming vats of 'vin ordinaire', we finally learn how this is posssible in Dr. Logan's well researched and encouragingly written follow up to "Choosing To Be Well". It's satisfying to know that wine does have a productive role to play in the control of the waistline and Dr. Logan incorporates limited consumption into a properly planned and executed calorie conserving daily diet plan. How refreshing to read a book that deals with the poids problem and comes across as non judgemental, light hearted and able to encourage us to view our silouettes as gently blurred at the edge, rather than as a subject for self disgust, despair, therapy, and 'binge and purge' self abuse. The sensible yet compelling tone of The California Wine Country Diet: The Indulgent Guide To Managing Your Weight, is a welcome relief to those of us who have been badgered to give up more and more of our aggrandizing pleasures. Who of us does not enjoy California wines and yet still want to get into those old faded jeans and not have the stitches stressed to the point of severance? If that's one of your concerns there's help at hand thanks to Dr. Logan.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous Recipes and Wine Too, February 20, 2006

By 

P. A. Budzik (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The California Wine Country Diet: The Indulgent Approach to Managing Your Weight (Hardcover)

A wonderfully written book that is organized and easy to follow without discouraging those of us who have tried to be successful with unreasonable and unrealistic diets. This book not only provides a tool for menu planning but fabulous recipes that are easy to follow and taste wonderful. All this and wine too...

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living Well, February 27, 2006

By 

T. Evans "Enthusiast" (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The California Wine Country Diet: The Indulgent Approach to Managing Your Weight (Hardcover)

In the past, as I tried other diets, I was always wary about having a glass of wine with my meal. Now, I find that I can do so and still remain fit. In fact, what Dr. Logan proposes is a life style which aims to achieve the best of health with the best of life. At last, we can raise a glass "To your health," and really mean it.