This is not a "diet" blog

It's been almost 2 years since I wrote my last post here in April 2012. The blog was going great, I was getting tons of positive feedback, and then...I stopped.

Why? One obvious reason is that I had an ever-more-active baby to tend to. (She's now 2 years old!) But the other reason is that, six months after having her, I had lost all the baby weight and then some. I didn't have the motivation to cook "diet" meals anymore.

But then I remembered that this was never meant to be a diet blog. It's a healthy-eating blog--and there's a difference. Last week, Amanda Marcotte wrote an amusing post about US News and World Report's rankings of 32 popular diet fads. Most of these--including supplements, juice cleanses, and the trendy "Paleo" diet--got crap ratings. The only ones that work aren't "diets" at all:

The best-ranked diets sound suspiciously like something your doctor would tell you to embrace, not as a diet, but as general rules for eating to prevent heart disease and diabetes. Indeed, some of the best diets, such as the DASH diet, the TLC diet, or the Mayo Clinic diet weren't developed for weight loss at all. Two were created to help heart patients get healthier, and the Mayo Clinic diet is just general good sense for eating. It seems that US News is trying to trick its readers into giving up fad diets and instead, like a bunch of boring, untrendy, healthy people, just eat right.

Ah, yes--eating right. As Marcotte humorously explains, that's the last thing most people want to try.

 Luckily, Americans will not be fooled. We have an endless appetite for trend diets that promise rapid weight loss through unsustainable and often expensive methods. We will buy up any crap supplement, food additive, or even skin cream that promises that we can lose weight rapidly. This is why, as the New York Times reports Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission has charged four more companies with deceptive advertising of useless weight loss products—and why 13 percent of fraud claims to the FTC involve weight-loss products, "more than twice the number in any other category."

Once again, this is a healthy eating blog. Although I'm no longer trying to lose weight, I will continue to post healthy dinner recipes that are also fun to make and eat. Welcome back!