Well Fed On the Town

The Saint-Tropez lifestyle isn’t just for the rich and famous. Certain pleasures offered by the beautiful coastal town located in France’s intoxicating Cote d’Azur (blue coast) can be enjoyed at home thanks to Apostolos Pappas, PhD and Marie-Annick Courtier, authors of The Saint-Tropez Diet. The pleasures I am referring to involve gourmet food and a healthy attitude toward living and enjoyment.

What is Saint-Tropez? It’s a French island on the French Riviera known for its lively nightlife, yacht filled docks and chic beaches. Once frequented by A-list celebrities, it’s more popular among tourists now than stars.

Not normally a fan of diet books I was skeptical when I received a copy of The Saint-Tropez Diet from publisher and recognized nutrition expert, Andrew Flach. As a gourmet professional I am already conscious of food and nutrition. I maintain a healthy lifestyle and have never felt a need to read a diet book. After absorbing the nutrition and health lesson of the first ninety pages I realized, The Saint-Tropez Diet isn’t a diet book at all, it is a lifestyle book. This distinction had me incredibly impressed. It is a book for anyone who wants to eat and live well, regardless of their need to lose weight. The Saint-Tropez Diet book offers readers three distinct sections: nutritional education, diet regimen, healthy recipes. Authored by Apolostolos Pappas, PhD a research biochemist and food scientist and Marie-Annick Courtier a French chef it is wonderful education in how to eat and live well, with very little compromise.

The Saint-Tropez Diet is not about gimmicks and weight loss tricks. It is about living a healthy lifestyle that is tested and true. I can attest to it in fact, as I already live the Saint-Tropez way. As an importer of French food and devout Francophile I travel to the Southern regions of France regularly, as a result I’ve adopted certain aspects of the French lifestyle. I walk to destinations as often as possible and take time to consider what I am and will be eating during the course of a day. Food and health aren’t secondary considerations; they are the basis for how I live daily. The Saint-Tropez Diet book teaches readers how to live this way.

By using delicious everyday ingredients, it is possible to eat divinely well and lose or maintain you optimum weight. It is about enjoying the pleasures of the sea and farm while still being able to take in such delights as chocolate and wine. The first half of the book focuses on the nutritional value of foods, so readers can better understand how to make their diets work for them as opposed to against. The second half of the book puts the information to use via a schedule of daily meals with accompanying recipes. The diet itself last fifty-six days, a long enough period to adopt a lifestyle I like to refer to as the Saint-Tropez way. As further testimate to my support of the ideas represented within this book, I am planning for Splendid Palate, my French food importing business, to launch a section devoted the The Saint-Tropez Diet. Working with the publisher and authors, the section will be filled with products that are optimum for maintaining the Saint-Tropez Lifestyle.

The notion of a fifty-six day diet, seems a bit stringent to me. It is a lot to ask a person to adhere to a regime for fifty-six days straight, waking up each morning and eating and preparing meals by instruction, down to the last ingredients. I tend to be independent and want to add my own ideas to anything I commit to. Fortunately, The Saint-Tropez Diet book is still for this type of person, as the diet is well explained. It is broken into weeks first, with a summary of the goals of each. It seems then, that as long as the reader grasps the concept of the lifestyle, is it possible to occasionally alter ingredients and still finding a healthy end. The Saint-Tropez Diet is filled with some of the finest and most delicious ingredients the world has to offer: fish, poultry, nuts, grains, fruits, vegetables, cheese, chocolate and wine among others. It provides for a wonderful way to live and eat healthy.