Dr. Pierre Dukan - The Dukan Diet Cookbook: The Essential Companion to the Dukan Diet

---

The material in this book is for informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for the advice and care of your physician. As with all new weight-loss or weight-maintenance regimes, the nutrition and fitness program described in this book should be followed only after first consulting with your physician to make sure it is appropriate for your individual circumstances. Keep in mind that nutritional needs vary from person to person, depending on age, sex, health status, and total diet.

The author and the publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information contained in this book.

I wrote the book that you are now holding in France for the French public, and, as perhaps you are aware, the French public is known for two particular cultural features. In addition to being one of the countries most attached to its cuisine and the enjoyment of food, France is also home to some of the worlds slimmest women. I did not conceive this book as a traditional cookbook, focusing solely on flavor and pleasure, but rather as a companion to my Dukan Diet plana book full not just of delicious recipes, but of delicious recipes that fit with my golden rules and that use the 100 foods that are allowable on my diet. When I handed over the manuscript for The Dukan Diet to my editor, I was aware that this was the finishing touch to a lifetimes work. The goal of this work had been to provide a methodfirst for myself, then for my patients, and finally for my future readersto fight weight problems.

The result is my very own method, one that has taken shape over thirty years of daily medical practice and one that has been tried and tested in almost every corner of the world. When I first started out in the field of nutrition, I, like all my French medical colleagues, was taught that calories counted, and that low-calorie diets, in which every type of food was allowable but in modest quantities, were the way to lose weight. Nowadays, what I know and practice I have learned through direct daily contact with my patients: that low-calorie diets are ineffective for flesh-and-blood human beings, who have constant cravings to eat. It soon became obvious to me that you could not make an overweight person lose weight and stay slim simply by giving them advice to eat less, even if that advice is based on common sense or scientific research. Dissatisfied with the majority of the diets in vogue, which are only concerned with a dazzling but short-lived victory, and aware of how ineffective low-calorie diets are in reforming overeaters into careful eaters, I developed my own weight-loss diet: the alternating protein diet. Years of medical practice have revealed it to be both the most effective and the most easy-to-follow diet available today, one that delivers the maximum short-, medium-, and long-term results.

The impact of The Dukan Diet, the way it has spread, and the affectionate messages I receive from my readers give my life meaning. Whatever my hopes and ambitions may have been when writing my first book, I could never have imagined that it would be so well received by such an incredibly wide and diverse public. The book has been translated and published in countries as distant as Korea, Brazil, and Bulgaria. How the book spread initially owed very little to marketing and absolutely nothing to advertising. Instead, it sold itself, being passed on from one person to another. From this, I have concluded that the book contained a benefit over and beyond the weight loss results; readers were enjoying the empathy, energy, and experience I bring to my patients as a medical doctor.

As I already mentioned, I have received many letters telling me about results and expressing warmth and gratitude. But I have also received some letters containing criticism or suggestions. Among the latter, some people wanted my weight-loss program to include a section about exercise, and others asked for extra recipes. In the 2011 edition of The Dukan Diet, I satisfied this first request with a whole chapter devoted to exercise, one in which exercise is not simply advised, but formally prescribed as medicine. This book, The Dukan Diet Cookbook, has been written to satisfy the second request. For this cookbook, I have been lucky enough to draw upon the inventiveness and contributions of all those people who developed recipes while they were on the diet.

For this I am grateful. And finally I would like to thank you, the reader, for embarking with me on this culinary journey to lasting weight loss.

For those of you unacquainted with my program or diet, my entire method is based on two main food groups:

• foods rich in animal proteins
• vegetables

These two food categories make up the natural foundation of our human diet. This is because when our species came into being some fifty thousand years ago, our diet consisted of these foods. And to this day, the human body possesses a whole system for digestion and elimination best suited for the foods we ate when we first appeared on earth. This fact lies at the very heart of my approach.

It is not an ideological approach advocating that we return to some backward-looking age, but rather a pragmatic one that recognizes how powerful the inclinations are that are part of our very nature. When our species came into being, man was designed to hunt, to pursue game, and to catch fish. Women concentrated on gathering whatever foods they could find, especially plants. As a result, meat, fish, and vegetables very early on acquired the status of foundation foods, considered the most appropriate foods for humans, both in regard to nutrition and in regard to their emotional power (this being infinitely more useful in weight control). The problem is that for fifty thousand years, these foods have been evolving alongside us. It is clear that humans are not what they were.

No longer hunter-gatherers, people have become sedentary and have learned to grow crops and breed animals. They have built civilizations and brought the environment under their control, so that we can now take from it exactly what we want, including our food, which is now designed far more to be a source of pleasure than a source of nutrition. By doing this, we have created a new diet, poles apart from the one we were designed to eat, and we have become addicted to its voluptuous pleasures. Our new diet appeals to the senses; it is seductive, rich, luscious, and emotionally comforting. But it is a diet that makes us fat. There are two food groups in our current diet, fats and sugars, that for a long time were found only in foods considered rare and luxurious, but which over the past fifty years have had a dramatic emergence.