Europe is heeding the call of the Norse: A diet rich in berries, fish, nuts, and game is charting a course to boosting health and losing pounds. Kate Christensen reports on the New Nordic phenomenon.

My father’s grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind. But the closest I ever came as an adult to realizing that idyll was in the Ikea cafeteria, when my then-husband and I were furnishing our house and we always made time to eat Swedish meatballs with lingonberries, savory little nuggets with Dr. Seuss–like fruit—a Nordic mini-vacation.

Flash-forward ten years: I left the marriage and New York, fell in love with a native New Englander, moved with him to Maine, got older. And as all this happened, without my really noticing it, about seven pounds of unfamiliar weight settled around my midsection. Where did it come from? Domestic happiness? A more relaxing environment? Midlife? Probably all of the above.

I lost it all last year on the 5:2 diet, a British system that really works, as long as you stick to fasting two days a week. With discipline and the frequent pinch of hunger, a pound a week came off for two months. Yet as soon as I went off the diet, all the weight returned, plus three extra pounds. But I wasn’t raised to give up easily. When my father took me out on a sailboat as a child, he told me, “We’re Norwegians. We never get seasick.”

I recently stumbled across a number of articles in the British press about something called the New Nordic diet, which was described as “regional, sustainable, seasonal, and tasty,” not to mention possibly the world’s healthiest eating plan. “Forget the Mediterranean diet . . . go Nordic!” harrumphed the Daily Mail. It sounded almost too good to be true. Since I’m a Viking, I reasoned, I should probably eat like one—but not the Old Norse diet; i.e., tankards of mead and spit-roasted venison haunches eaten at rough-hewn tables in vast, drafty halls. I’d rather subsist on the Scandinavian food I’ve always loved: creamed herring, pickled beets, Wasa rye crackers, and gjetost, that hard ocher cheese that tastes like condensed milk.