Fit Fare

This is part of the Healthy Book Club. My mission for the Healthy Book Club is to present you with books that will provide you with the tools and inspiration to live a healthy, balanced and happy life. So pull up a comfy chair and let’s get reading!

I was talking to a friend who admitted that her New Year’s resolution is to take better care of her body, but all she wants to eat is creamy, cheesy and fattening foods.

Sound familiar?

When the weather turns cold, we often long for comforting, rich dishes that warm our bellies. Forget the salads and steamed veggies, and bring on the macaroni and cheese! This type of eating made sense back when we needed the extra layer of body fat for warmth. These days, indoor heating and puffy coats makes the excess weight unnecessary, not to mention unhealthy.

But our cravings aren’t leading us completely off course, as I learned in The 3-Season Diet: Eat the Way Nature Intended: Lose Weight, Beat Food Cravings, and Get Fit by Dr. John Douillard. He suggests that in winter we should favor foods that are warm, heavy and oily. However, the smart choices are oils, avocados and nuts, not cheese and dairy products. Talk about a great excuse for homemade guacamole and a handful of pistachios!

Dr. Douillard, an Ayurvedic practitioner, also recommends foods that are sweet, sour and salty in the winter. According to Ayurveda, these tastes warm the body. Chocolate covered almonds, anyone?

The book provides an understanding of how changing your diet based on the seasons can ensure that you stay healthy. For example, “the extent to which you get dried out in the winter because you did not eat warm and oily foods is the extent to which you will produce mucus excess in the spring,” which can result in colds, coughs, allergies and more.

Dr. Douillard provides seasonal meal plans as well as a detailed graph of the primary season to eat each food, including grains, fruits, veggies and meats. Overall, the book is designed to help you create balance in your diet, so that you can have balance in your life.

If you’re eating the same things now that you were eating in July, I’d highly recommend checking out The 3-Season Diet: Eat the Way Nature Intended: Lose Weight, Beat Food Cravings, and Get Fit. You don’t wear the same clothes in the summer as you wear in the winter, so why would you eat the same foods?