There are many forms of diets available and frankly, I think most are crap.  Anything that is counter to your normal lifestyle is not sustainable.  I believe you need to change your lifestyle and your choices a little bit at a time, and then make sure they are sustainable.  When I have tried dieting previously, I have seen quick results only to backslide after some period of time.  I love drinking wine, I love eating great food and I have always loved my snacks, be they potato chips, popcorn, ice cream or chocolate.

Over the last two months, I have lost 13 pounds (6 kgs) and have been happy about the results.  But I have done that before only to have backslid sometime later and put the weight back on again.  But this time, I have notice something different.  I am still eating the same amount of food for a main meal, but I have been able to substitute my previous poor choice of snacks with healthier ones and be content doing that.  The giant Kit Kat bar with 900 calories or the bowl of microwave popcorn with 500 calories has been replaced by an apple at 45 calories.  If I feel the need for a small sweet treat, I have one piece of chocolate at 70 calories, or a small piece of homemade baked banana, zucchini, or carrot cake with about 125 calories.  I am not munching on the six or so biscuits I used to eat every day at work, nor am I eating multiple chocolates or having multiple treats in a single sitting after dinner.  That’s it – that’s all I did and I have dropped 13 pounds.

Fortunately, I did not require eliminating wine or even cutting down on wine.  I am drinking the exact same amount of wine I had before.  Wine is not high in calories.  150 ml glass (about 5 ounces) is 125 calories.  This means an entire bottle of wine is only 625 calories on average.  I can have half a bottle wine every day and  consume only about 300 – 325 calories which is about the third the caloric intake as the giant Kit Kat bar I mentioned earlier.  Once I knew this trade-off, I gave up the mass consumption of unhealthy snacks and allowed myself to keep drinking wine.  Wine is satisfying and it is also good for you, if you are drinking two or three glasses per day.

In my upcoming book, I recommend a lot of other books for reading, including two on wine diets.  There is good science supporting a wine diet along with other healthy foods.  For me or almost anyone else to lose weight, there are many other things you should give up or constrain before you need to consider limiting your wine intake.  I won’t go into the details here as they are presented in the books.  I have included excerpts from my upcoming book which describes two wine diet books.  a description of them follows:

The Red Wine Diet (Roger Corder): The Red Wine Diet credibly explains the health benefits of red wine. It shows how to use appropriate amounts of red wine to provide an increase in antioxidants and lower hypertension to improve overall health. It goes further and provides healthy food recipes into an overall lifestyle plan of which wine and particularly red wine are an integrated component of that healthy lifestyle. I found this book useful, if a bit detailed in the science, but it is the explanation of the science which makes it credible. Minimally, this book reduced guilt associated with drinking a bit of wine almost every day and has encouraged me to continue to enjoy wine as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Age Gets Better With Wine: New Science for a Healthier, Better & Longer Life (Richard Baxter, MD): This text is similar to The Red Wine Diet, but an easier and more enjoyable read. It focuses less on the scientific understanding of ‘why’ to follow the diet and focuses more on ‘how’ to follow the diet and what to do. However, it is still very credible.

Either one of these wine diet books is a great read. Since it involves your health and your passion for wine, I recommend reading both as they provide somewhat different perspectives, and the combination of both provides a number of useful tips, some which may work best for your situation.

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2013.  Steve Shipley
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