Want to improve your diet but don’t know where to begin? Let 7-Color Cuisine show you the way. This book’s four-step system—which motivates you to enjoy a new way of eating, guides you in shopping for top-quality ingredients, helps you prepare healthful meals, and encourages you to savor your foods—is as easy as counting your colors. If you’ve been searching for a way to pair smart nutrition with great taste, you’re sure to find 7-Color Cuisine the perfect addition to your kitchen. Marcia Zimmerman, CN, is an internationally known educator and consultant to some of the country's leading nutrition and supplement companies. Her 7-Color Cuisine System, which she developed over ten years, has taught countless people how to alleviate their physical problems through simple lifestyle changes.Marcia's website is marciazimmerman.com 7-Color Cuisine: Making Healthy, Colorful Foods a Lifestyle for Nutrition and Good Eating is for busy people who need to improve their diets but don’t know where to begin. Working with the book is like having a personal nutrition coach in your kitchen guiding you to new pleasure in your dining experience. I’ll help you unlock the keys to the treasures of good, healthy eating in four simple, easy-to-follow steps. My 7-Color Cuisine system is a complete course in eating for optimum wellness that includes shopping guides, menu plans, recipes and useful tips to make your meals not only feasts for your eyes and treats for your palate, but nourishing for your mind and body. As a scientist and nutritionist, I’ve looked at how we eat and what we eat with a critical eye. As a meal planner and family chef, I have also looked at how we eat and what we eat with a loving eye. I know both ways of looking are necessary to making and eating meals, for ourselves and our families, to answer the psychological and physiological needs we bring to every table when we sit down to a meal. And that’s why I’ve developed the 7-Color Cuisine system. Preparing a meal and enjoying it should be an enjoyable, satisfying culinary experience that engages your senses of smell, vision, and taste. The 7-Color plan guides you through the total experience. It is the perfect antidote for those who have viewed food as the enemy or have never known what it is like to feel fully satisfied by what they’ve just eaten. What we eat becomes part of us through digestive transformation, something many of us don’t want to think about. Yet food can also satisfy our deepest psychological, neurological, and social being—provided we choose a variety of high-quality and colorful foods. That’s what I’ll help you do with the 7-Color plan and its four easy steps: get set, go shopping, fix meals, and savor your food. Step One: Get Set Step One prepares you for a new way of eating by carefully examining what you’re currently eating and under what conditions. In this step you’ll identify dietary pitfalls that you’ll need to remove from your refrigerator, freezer, and pantry. I give you lists of alternatives you can substitute for unhealthy foods and then help you make a new shopping list to stock your pantry from suggested replacements and staple items needed for the recipes in this book. The appendixes provide additional information, including resources for specific foods (Appendix D), a checklist of cookware and utensils you’ll use (Appendix E), and measurements conversion (Appendix F). Step Two: Go Shopping Step Two explains how to restock your pantry and purchase the fresh ingredients needed for the first week’s menus. You’ll choose foods by their colors, de-emphasizing the type of food you’re selecting. This section also includes helpful storage and shopping tips and shows how to clean and store fresh foods to save time in meal preparation. Step Three: Fix Meals Most of the dinner recipes in Step Three will take less than 30 minutes to prepare. I’ll point out where slow cooking in a crockpot and accelerated preparation using a pressure cooker can conserve preparation time. My weekly meal plans are simple but elegant and offer beautiful food presented to appeal to both the eye and the palate. The menu plans focus on eating 7 colors every day, and I’ll show you exactly how to ease into the system by making adjustments as you progress through each step. Preparing your meals at home using the freshest available ingredients is always my goal, and now yours, too. Step Four: Savor Your Food Step Four shows you how to enjoy your meals, emphasizing every bite with suggestions for controlling portion size and choosing the best menu items when dining out or at home. I’ll also suggest ways to reduce the potentially harmful effects of eating unhealthful foods, because sometimes we all do. Why Choose Foods by Color? Nature’s healing colors abound in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and healthy oils. The colors are actually pigments that come from a special class of chemicals known as phytonutrients . When you eat food