The Mediterranean Diet for Beginners: The Complete Guide - 40 Delicious Recipes, 7-Day Diet Meal Plan, and 10 Tips for Success Paperback – April 5, 2013

I have learned a lot about the Mediterranean Diet. I am eating healthier. Menus are easy to follow. The book is very detailed. It teaches you what to eat, when to eat it, why and how your body is affected by eating this diet. Very informative. The foods on menus is affordable.

Need to lose weight & Mediterranen diet recommended. I like fresh veggies & its recommended alot in the book. I'm also trying to avoid sugar/carbs & every so often doing whole weight bread w/avocado for breakfast. Recipes are easy for me to incorporate into my every day.

"The Mediterranean Diet for Beginners" explains where the diet originated, how it was discovered and made public to the world, what it is, and its health benefits. It then provides a seven day sample meal plan, followed by a selection of recipes for breakfast, lunch, snacks, dinner and dessert.The heart of the diet is fresh vegetables and fruit, seafood instead of meat, whole grains, nuts, olive oil and red wine. But this is not a "fad" diet or a diet simply to lose weight; this is a lifestyle change. This intended lifestyle emulates the way of life of those who lived on the Mediterranean coasts and whose daily exercise and moderate healthful eating produced longer and healthier lives. It includes joyously lingering over your meal with friends and family.This lifestyle change from the standard American diet-- that is high in unhealthy fats and processed food and is ordered and eaten rapidly and usually alone-- is radical. This is a life change such as cutting up your credit card and paying only in cash, or selling your car so you will go everywhere by bicycle and public transportation. The book carefully guides you through this transition and you must be prepared to purge your kitchen of every food that is unhealthy and would be a stumbling block to your new resolve, your new life.The book does not mention that in the last decades fast food, pizza, ice cream and soda machines have infiltrated some of the Mediterranean coasts where the healthiest people had lived. The result? Pediatricians notice in their young charges a striking tendency to diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol as the changing diet is producing an epidemic of obesity and related maladies. Do you need any more incentive to trying what's suggested in this book?

I think this book can be summed up as: "Eat Rabbit Food And Be Healthy". The diet is to eat mostly vegetables and fruits, some nuts, beans, and olive oil. And to a lesser degree whole grains, fish, and poultry. There, that's the diet. So now that I've summed up the 70 page book in one sentence, is there any point in buying the book? Maybe.The book contains one week worth of suggested breakfasts, lunches, afternoon snacks, dinners, and deserts. I did find those somewhat useful, but maybe a tad unrealistic (for me anyway). For example: Monday Lunch: Garden Salad with whole grain roll. Ok, nobody would deny that this is pretty healthy (although I guess it contains no protein), but is that something that you think you could realistically have as a recurring meal at lunch, and have enough fuel to finish off the day and feel fulfilled? If so, then you probably don't need this book, and if not you'll probably find this book frustrating.One good thing is that while some meals don't really require any "cooking" as such (like the above), for the ones that do, there are recipes. Things like penne with roasted vegetables, spicy-sweet roasted walnuts, pesto cucumber boats etc. I'm not any kind of super-motivated cook in any way, but the recipes are (for the most part) simple and quick enough that I could see myself preparing many of them.Also the book devotes 10 pages or so to discuss the diet as a whole, it's goals, the science behind it an such.So do I recommend the book? Meh, sure, it's got some useful stuff in it, and I do believe in the science behind it (my dietician gave me a pretty heavy-duty scientific study writeup on it which was pretty compelling). But this book in particular is pretty over-priced for what it is, and while I think it is cool to get a feel for what some Mediterranean diet-compliant meals might look like, I don't think the particular meals that they present here are particularly compelling, nor are there enough of them.

Bought this as a gift for a family member! They absolutely love it!

I don't normally submit reviews but I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It's short, around 70 pages so I was wondering how good it would actually be. Well, it's great! It's clearly written and gives anyone just starting on trying to live the Mediterranean Diet way a vision of what living on this eating plan will look like. The first sections give the history of this way of eating and then subsequent sections really break down the individual components into short paragraphs. I liked the fact, for example, that I didn't need to read 2-3 pages of filler text to find out that for seafood, I'd need to have at least 3-4 servings of a recommended list of types of seafood. Like I said, it's clear, short and gives you the facts for each compoenent of the Mediterranean Diet. There's also a 7 day sample meal plan and then a short section of recipes, and the recipes are composed of food that I think most people would eat. I'm a Collection Development Librarian at a public libray so I look at a lot of reviews and select a lot of material, and I really think this is a good addition to home libraries of people starting off on this helathful food journey.