The Montignac Diet

The Almost "Perfect Diet"

The Montignac diet must be the closest to perfect of all the diets I have reviewed so far. Just for a moment imagine a “diet” that allows you to drink drink red wine and eat dark chocolate without feeling guilty. Imagine not having to count every single calorie, not feeling hungry all the time or getting light-headed half-way through the morning! But is losing weight on such a diet impossible? No, it isn't. A Frenchman pioneered a diet like this more than a decade ago.

His name is Michel Montignac and he has sold millions of diet books around the world. Montignac, an expert in nutrition, devised a practical, delicious, and deprivation-free approach to losing weight and keeping it off. The Montignac diet challenges common dieting practices (like counting calories) and offers fail-safe strategies for getting back on track.

The Montignac diet has allowed many French dieters (including the famous French chef,Paul Bocuse) to shed surplus pounds while allegedly improving their cardiovascular health and lowering their risk of diabetes.

Montignac’s credo is, "Je mange donc je maigris !" or in English, "I eat therefore I lose weight!”! While other diets focus on the “can’ts” and the “don’ts”, the Motignac Diet encourages dieters to savour the eating experience and to be adventurous and discover new flavours, tastes and textures in addition to the ones they already prefer.

Michel Montignac grew up as an overweight child in France at a time when obesity was rare. Sadly, this is no longer the case. Suffice to say, Michel was bullied because of his size. Over the course of 10 years, he bought no less than 350 diet books and went on at least 30 diets.

Years of fattening business lunches made the pounds pile on. Montignac worked for a large pharmaceutical firm giving him the opportunity to study weight loss and nutrition. His work (corroborated by research conducted at Harvard University) lead to the development of his diet. He has published more than 20 books that are available in 42 countries and in 25 languages.

Counting calories is a waste of time Montignac never restricted the amount of food he ate because he was convinced that calorie-counting diets were unsuccessful. He noticed that in the last century, the typical North American daily caloric intake has decreased by as much as 30 percent. Yet there are more obese people on this continent than anywhere else in the world.

The French have the lowest average body weight per capita in the Western world, and yet they eat extremely well. Montignac explains in The French Diet that this has to do with the selection of foods the French intuitively choose as well as the quality, freshness, and the way they combine their ingredients. This approach focuses on balanced, selective eating, not on deprivation.

"Lowering calories doesn't work," Montignac says. "But eating the right kinds of foods does." He lost 35 pounds on his own diet, without a lot of effort, and he has kept himself at a trim 170 pounds (he's 5'9") for more than 20 years now.

The program classifies all food into four main categories: carbohydrates (useful and less useful); lipids (meat, dairy, oils); carbohydrate-lipids (nuts, avocados, organ meats) and fibre (most vegetables, whole grains). Combinations of food like potatoes (a undesirable carbohydrate) with meat (a lipid) are strictly discouraged.

The Montignac Diet can be described as a combination of the Food combining, Mediterranean and Glycemic Index Diets ll-in-one. If the Montignac Diet is reminiscent of food combining and other diets, Michel does concede the point. "But Fit for Life, for example, leaves you dying of hunger. My method doesn't," he promises.