100-mile Diet

The premise of the 100-mile Diet is that people should eat only those foods which are available within 100 miles of their homes. It’s based upon a 2007 Canadian book by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon called ‘The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating’ also known as ‘Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally’. While the idea of eating locally grown food is not a new one, this book and the diet it spawned have found significant commercial success within Canada. Several restaurants and catering services have started offering 100-mile diets, and Vancouver City Hall even held a 100-mile themed breakfast. Smith and MacKinnon even helped create a 2009 Food Network Canada series based upon the book called ‘The 100 Mile Challenge’.

The book is critically lauded for being honest in its portrayal of both the joys of eating locally as well as the challenges, with the authors struggling to find any type of locally grown cooking oil, rice, and sugar. The authors admit that the diet was very hard the first year, since they were completely without resources and had to do a lot of research to find basic food stocks. It took them over seven months to find the lone farmer within their 100 mile radius who grew wheat. While their diet is not specifically a weight loss plan, it does eliminate processed foods and relies heavily upon fresh produce and whole grains. These types of strategies have proven extremely successful in enabling long-term weight loss.