This is my favorite time of the year. The summer fruits start hitting the supermarkets and produce stands. Every cooking magazine is chocked full of simple and delicious recipes with fruit as the main ingredient. Fruit is a powerful food when it comes to health, happiness and weight loss.

Truth be told, you don’t really have to do much to summer fruits to make them taste amazing, you just merely wait until they’re ripe and dive right in.

When I was a kid, my mom used to buy a big basket of strawberries and cut them up, put them in a bowl, and sprinkle sugar on top. She would put them in the fridge and wait a few hours until they mixed with the sugar to make a syrupy sweet mess at the bottom of that bowl. I used to love that. But these days, I don’t want to ruin berries, or any fruit for that matter, with silly sugar. Let the delicious summer fruits subtly seduce you on their own. Taste the sweetness only nature can produce.

Luckily, new trends in weight loss are now showing that perhaps we don’t need to steer clear of the calories in fruit, but instead load up on mostly fruits that contain more water in a larger package. Watermelon is the perfect example. It is a huge fruit, can take up a lot of room on your picnic plate, tastes amazing and is mostly water.

Which means, you can eat a bunch of watermelon, feel full and eat fewer of the high calorie foods you would have eaten instead (i.e. evil culprits like mayonnaise-laden potato salad or an extra hot dog). This little trick can help you fell fuller longer and might even eliminate those cravings for the brownies or ice-cream that can be typically served at summer get-togethers.

Other great fruits to consider are raspberries, grapefruit, melons, peaches, and pineapple (and to me these are the all-stars). These fruits are full of a soluble fiber called pectin (which is also sometimes contained in fruit-like gummy candies and jelly beans) which can cling to fats in the digestive tract and flush them out before they can be absorbed by the body. Don’t go crazy though, this is merely meant as an aid in slimming down, not an excuse to eat more.

Another great tip and one that is dear to the green movement, is to try to buy and eat local produce whenever possible. It supports your own community, and because it doesn’t need to travel as far, it doesn’t require as much gas to be consumed and in turn can even be slightly less expensive these days. In addition, because it travels a shorter distance to the consumer can actually be picked and sold when it is ripe. Vine-ripened fruit is shown to contain twice as much of something than that of green-picked fruit- super-oxidants known as nonfluorescent chlorophyll catabolites (boy is that a mouthful!). These fabulous NCCs (can we call them that?) assist the liver’s ability to burn fat. Hoorah!

It does make sense that the longer something is in the soil and absorbing the sun, the more nutrients it contains…

I have to say, this is the some of the best news I have heard all week. So go out and buy some ripe and local sweet fruit and have a fun weekend. You may just be a delicious baby-step leaner.