Rethink Healthy Eating With Recipes and Advice From ‘Cook. Nourish. Glow.’
Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week is Cook. Nourish. Glow. 120 Recipes That Will Help You Lose Weight, Look Younger, and Feel Healthier by Amelia Freer (Harper Wave), a nutritional therapist and author of the bestselling Eat. Nourish. Glow.
The cover of ‘Cook. Nourish. Glow. 120 Recipes That Will Help You Lose Weight, Look Younger, and Feel Healthier’ by Amelia Freer (Harper Wave).
Amelia Freer may be the picture of good health now, but for many years her diet consisted of processed, convenience foods and endless cups of sugary tea. Irritable bowel syndrome, acne, low energy, bad moods, infections, and even a bout of shingles eventually led Freer to completely revamp her diet. So convinced of the link between what we eat and how we feel, Freer returned to school to study nutritional therapy and ultimately turned her passion into a career.
Freer now runs a successful London-based clinic and Boy George, James Corden, and Sam Smith are among her many success stories. The clinic has a long wait list, but lucky for us, Freer has written two books, last year’s bestselling Eat. Nourish. Glow., which features her 10-step program for losing weight, looking younger, and feeling healthier, and the recently published companion cookbook, Cook. Nourish. Glow.
Freer’s healthy eating plan requires discipline —she’s very anti-snack — and few would call it easy, but she does take a gentle and practical approach. Rather than changing everything at once, Freer encourages readers to think of healthy eating as a gradual and on-going process, and to change just one thing at a time. As Freer likes to say about getting healthy, “There’s no one giant step that does it. It’s a lot of little steps.”
Spiced Shrimp with Spinach and Coconut (Photograph: Susan Bell)
One of those steps requires cutting back on foods that cause inflammation, including grains, gluten, processed sugar, and dairy. Freer also advocates for incorporating good fats into your diet, eating a colorful assortment of ingredients, and perhaps most importantly, forgoing packaged foods and making your own meals, “so you know exactly what has gone into them and you know that everything passing your lips will be working for you, not against you.” That seems easy enough, but the tricky part, says Freer, is getting people into the kitchen.
There’s a widely held belief that cooking, especially healthy cooking, is difficult and time-consuming, says Freer. Eager to dispel this misconception and get people to the stove, Freer uses the term “food assembly,” and argues that it requires little more than picking the right ingredients and learning a few simple ways to put them together. Changing one’s mindset about cooking may or may not help, but Freer’s food can speak for itself. The book’s 120 recipes are both accessible and appealing and they certainly don’t require spending hours in the kitchen.
Freer’s “Kitchen Confidence” chapter focuses on learning a handful of easy cooking techniques — poaching, baking, sautéing — and using them to make dishes like Roasted Peppers with Baked Eggs and Spiced Shrimp with Spinach and Coconut. The “It’s All About Taste” chapter includes simple flavor-enhancers, such as Kale and Almond Pesto, Green Harissa, and Tapenade, while the “On the Go” chapter is filled with simple portable meals to help you avoid processed, packaged foods when you’re out and about. There’s also a chapter devoted to health-minded entertaining with recipes for Herby Lamb Chops with Salad and Cod with Leeks and Coconut-Oil “Hollandaise.”
Herby Lamb Chops with Salad (Photograph: Susan Bell)
In keeping with Freer’s healthy eating principles, her book is light on grains, gluten, processed sugar, and dairy. But she makes some exceptions. “The Naughty Chapter” features a handful of lighter takes on dessert, including Chocolate Cupcakes with Whipped Almond Butter and Chia Seed Jam and a Peanut Butter and Jam Smoothie that Freer created for Sam Smith. There’s also a comfort foods chapter that includes healthy takes on favorites like fries, meatballs, and chili.
Even if these recipes and advice have you hopping toward the kitchen, Freer again encourages caution. “Rather than vowing to now cook all your meals from scratch, start with one meal and build up from there,” she writes. “Very soon it will just become part of your day.”
Visit Yahoo Food throughout the week for recipes from Cook. Nourish. Glow. 120 Recipes That Will Help You Lose Weight, Look Younger, and Feel Healthier by Amelia Freer (Harper Wave).
Check out other cookbooks from Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week:
Lucky Peach Presents: 101 Easy Asian Recipes
