Forget low-carb, high-protein, or no-sugar diets. We are now embarking on a new era in weight loss. Rather than counting calories and carb grams, diets are changing courses and focusing on eating real foods that are natural, whole and above all, good for you.
Case in point: Laura Pensiero’s Real-Food Diet, which has been recently lauded in O magazine. Pensiero is the current owner of Gigi Trattoria in Rhinebeck, New York and a former culinary coordinator at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Wellness and Prevention Center.
Her Real-Food Diet focuses on just that: Eating real food that is fresh, seasonal and void of preservatives and additives. Local food, as Pensiero points out, is nutritionally and environmentally superior to the same items that we normally purchase in large grocery store chains. The bagged lettuce that you grabbed from the produce section of your grocery store was likely harvested thousands of miles away and transported across the country in order to end up in your grocery cart. From farm to fork, our food is looking less and less like anything but fresh. But food and health advocates like Pensiero want to change that.
While overhauling the entire way you shop and prepare your meals may sound like a mountainous task, this nutritionist-turned-chef-turned-green-market-champion has broken it down into six very simple steps that anyone can easily incorporate into their lifestyle. And she promises that by eating foods that are closer to nature and less packaged and processed, your diet will inevitably be more nutrient dense and you will inevitably feel, well, like a million bucks.
Penseiro offers up some tantalizing recipes in her cookbook, Hudson Valley Mediterranean, which as its names implies, is heavily influenced by the healthy cooking practices of the Mediterranean culture. The Gigi Barbina Salad is filled with fresh beets, butternut squash, walnuts, goat cheese, baby greens and olive oil, and her Rustic Fruit Tart is overflowing with summer berries, apples and farm-fresh eggs.
The Real-Food Diet is not a diet like the ones we are typically used to, but rather it’s a way of eating that connects you closer to nature and closer to your health.
Here is the complete review of the Real-Food Diet.