The Sonoma diet plan is one of the most liberal diet plans. Instead of severely restricting what and how much the dieter eats, the plan calls for taking well balanced nutrition and in healthy amounts designed to allow the body to naturally reach it’s ideal weight. This doesn’t hold true throughout the entirety of the diet however; rather, the Sonoma diet actually starts out with a strict and very limiting regimen that gradually eases up on it’s restrictions as the dieter loses more weight and comes closer to achieving his or her ideal weight. Once ideal weight is achieved, more restrictions are lifted and the rest of the diet focuses more on maintenance and health. So what makes the Sonoma diet so powerful? Several principles were taken to form the diet’s basic philosophies.


Easy Learning Curve and Simple Meal Construction

The sonoma diet is one of the easiest to learn and apply compared to other dieting plans which have you counting calories and adding up numbers for each and every speck of food you consume. Instead of severe number crunching the recipes given for the sonoma diet are easy to prepare and are listed with their recommended serving portions.

The foods are grouped into subcategories where any food from a given category can be substituted for another in case you find something on the list that’s more to your taste than another type of food. Meal allowances are not based on calorie crunching but on simply making each meal balanced with portions set out for each nutritional group. This allows people to tailor the sonoma diet to suit their tastes as well as the availability of food in their areas.

To further add to the simplicity, instead of having to weigh and measure every serving, plate size is used to determine how much food you’re having; for example, half of your plate could be one food group, and the other two quarters are food from another two types. This makes laying out your meals much less of a chore.

Progressive Food Consumption

Where other diets claim that you should stick to ONLY the recommended food and beverages within the diet for your entire life to maintain your weight after losing it, the Sonoma diet instead works with 3 phases. The first phase is rather restrictive in the choices of food you can eat and is akin to other diet plans. However, this is simply to allow your body to adjust quickly to your new diet and prepare you for phase 2. In phase 2, some of the food restrictions are lifted, and this is meant to last all the way until your body reaches it’s ideal weight. After that, phase 3 is all about maintenance, so some other restrictions on the type of food you can eat are lifted.

This does not mean that you can eat whatever you want, however. There are still “bad” foods that you should avoid completely after taking the diet, like fatty foods and high-sugar, empty-calorie pastries. However, this is balanced by the fact that some “power” food types are recommended; these are often ones which provide high nutrition with little to no risk of weight gain even if you indulge in them.

Health over Severe Weight Loss

The main purpose behind the Sonoma diet is NOT to create people with super-slim figures. Instead, the plan emphasizes health and fitness, in the belief that a good figure follows naturally after. The goal is to reach the body’s ideal weight (based on genetic factors like height, gender, and bone structure). Once this weight is achieved, however, it’s up to the dieter whether to engage in exercise to tone up and slim down just a bit more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Diet Plans at a Glance, Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.