Poor old Montignac

By now it's more than twenty years ago that Michel Montignac published his first book Je mange donc je maigris - I eat so I lose weight. The book was tremendously popular in Holland at first, but it soon got branded as "just another diet" and that's the way it's described wherever you see it nowadays.
I'd had some experience with dieting at the time: I'd weightwatched off about 17 kilos at one time, and grew them right back on again when I stopped. I read Montignac's book in the early nineties, started eating according to it's principles and lost twenty kilos quite easily. I still eat that way, and my weight is still perfectly acceptable.

The principles are quite simple:

• Calorie-counting is the biggest scam of the century.


• Choose the right carbs: the ones with a low glycemic index.


• Choose good fats, especially fish oil and olive oil.


• Eat lots (lots!) of vegetables.


• Choose good quality, preferably organic, and avoid processed food like the plague.


• If you want to lose weight, don't eat fats and carbs during the same meal.


• Sugar is poison, and so are transfats.


• (You can drink a glass of good red wine every day)


• (When you decide to eat something "bad", make sure you get the best possible quality and take the time to really enjoy it!)

Even if Montignac's theoretical explanation of his principles was somewhat shaky on some points (the expression Not all calories are created equal hadn't been invented yet, and apparently Montignac himself hadn't thought of it), the principles themselves are very sound advice.
In fact: every expert nowadays will tell you exactly the same - check out Dr. Mercola, for instance, or Jonny Bowden, although each of them has his own take on the subject (here's an interesting post by Bowden about saturated fats, for instance). The nutrition chapters in my excellent weighttraining book could have been copied out of Montignac's book.
So Montignac was right all the time.
I knew this from my own experience, but now everything he wrote is being validated with scientific studies to prove it. Yet if you ask anyone, they'll say the Méthode Montignac was "just another fad diet". Poor old Montignac.