“How glorious it is to wake up
       each morning feeling twenty
       years younger!” —Haven Logan

About Haven Logan

ith The California Wine Country Diet author Haven Logan, Ph.D. says that she has come full circle back to the joys of food she experienced as a child. She first learned to love food’s many aspects through her father who was a gourmet chef and Vice President of General Foods in charge of research and development. She relates that she looked forward to the nightly adventure of trying new delicacies such as birds nest soup and dehydrated meats being tested for space flights, proudly proclaiming that “there was no food I wouldn’t try.”

Haven’s Educational and Professional Background
Haven’s educational background includes a B.A. in sociology from Barnard College at Columbia University, a masters degree in education from Bank Street College of Education, a masters degree in social work from the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. in psychology from International College. As a psychotherapist and program director she has specialized in the treatment of eating disorders and weight management for over 20 years. She has spoken about these subjects to hundreds of groups, as well as, on radio and television.

Haven was the founding director of the Serenity Eating Disorders Program at Mt. Diablo Medical Center in Concord, CA. She developed a number of weight-loss programs and provided the psychological support for people following just about every program you can imagine, from protein-sparing modified fasts to Weight Watchers to Atkins. She found that all these programs helped some people lose weight. The greatest failure came in maintaining that loss over time. As people slowly regained the weight they had worked so hard to lose, they felt discouraged, experienced low self-esteem, and complained of the adverse physical effects of large weight fluctuations.

Haven’s Personal Weight Challenges
Spending all her days listening to people worry about their weight, Haven says that she finally decided just not to think about her own. That solution may have taken some psychological pressure off, but it did not help her weight maintenance. Getting older and spending eight hours a day sitting listening to patients, she found the numbers on her own scale just kept going up.

In 2002 Haven’s book Choosing to Be Well: A Conscious Approach to a Healthier Lifestyle was published. This book explores the question of why people don’t do the things they know they should for their health. In the process of writing this book Haven says she finally came to accept that if she was going to be in the best health possible, she had to deal with her own weight gain.

The California Wine Country Diet is the result of Haven’s resolve to find an effective, healthy, comprehensive, and pleasurable approach to weight management that she could live with for the rest of her life. She says, “I know that this program works, not just because of the research it is based upon and the experience of my patients, but because it has laid the foundation for my own thirty-pound weight loss and maintenance. How glorious it is to wake up each morning feeling twenty years younger!”