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5 Great Healthy Reads

 

It has been said many times in many ways that if you are not “Growing then your are Dying”. The best way to grow is to keep informed, keep learning. But, what should you spend your precious little free time on reading, there is so much to choose from. Here is something to hopefully help you.

See below for some great reads:

 

Big Girl: How I gave up dieting and got a life

by Kelsey Miller

 

A hilarious and inspiring memoir about one young woman's journey to find a better path to both physical and mental health. At twenty-nine, Kelsey Miller had done it all: crash diets, healthy diets, and nutritionist-prescribed "eating plans," which are diets that you pay more money for. She'd been fighting her un-thin body since early childhood, and after a lifetime of failure, finally hit bottom. Millions of Americans have grown up with calorie counts in their heads, tried-and-true diet tips at the ready, and meticulous food journals in their pockets. And yet, as a nation, we’re heavier than ever. We know that dieting doesn’t really work in the long run, so how about just not dieting? What would happen then? That’s what Refinery29 blogger Miller attempted and what she chronicles in this wry, sometimes overly confessional memoir.

 

Miller goes on to share candid vignettes of going on and off multiple diets, getting her first job, falling in love, and facing her first Internet troll. The tone is raw and revealing, with self-deprecating humor sprinkled throughout; early on, Miller scripts out her inner dialogue with Seamless, an online food delivery service, in the process revealing her wit and vulnerability. By the end of this heartwarming and -breaking emotional roller-coaster, Miller has shed her self-destructive bingeing and dieting habits, learned to eat only out of hunger, and gained the ability to recognize and embrace who she is. Her honestly, hilariously told story, will appeal to any readers who have ever felt dissatisfaction with their bodies and will move them to tears of sorrow, laughter, and joy.

Hardwiring Happiness

by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.

As the old song goes, the key to happiness is "to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative." You know this, so why in the hell is it always so much easier to laser-in on the bad stuff? In this book, author Rick Hanson explains we're neurologically programmed that way: “The brain is like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.” 

Recent scientific breakthroughs have revealed that what we think and feel changes the brain. Dr. Rick Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness is the first book to show how to transform the simple positive experiences of daily life into neural structures that promote lasting health, contentment, love and inner peace. Dr. Hanson defines ‘taking in the good’ as “the deliberate internationalization of positive experiences in implicit memory.” In other words, being proactive about making positive experiences an inherent part of our memory. He’s created four steps of taking in the good, which are easy to remember with the helpful acronym, HEAL.

Have a positive experience.
Enrich it.
Absorb it.
Link positive and negative material.

 

“[Lingering on the positive] improves the encoding of passing mental states into lasting neural traits,” says Hanson. “That’s the key here: we’re trying to get the good stuff into us. And that means turning our passing positive experiences into lasting emotional memories.”

Taller, Slimmer, Younger: 21 Days to a Foam Roller Physique

by Lauren Roxburgh

As a fitness and alignment specialist, Lauren Roxburgh has worked with stars like Gwyneth Paltrow to align and elongate muscles, release tension, and remove toxins through the use of a foam roller. This book offers a 21-day program that can be done in 15 minutes a day and promises benefits from improved posture and weight loss to decreased anxiety and chronic pain.

There’s a new buzzword in the fitness world: fascia. It’s the connective tissue that wraps around your muscles and organs and helps keep everything in place. But in our increasingly busy and often stressful lives, tension and toxins are often stored within our fascia, resulting in serious long-term consequences including poor posture, excess weight, acute anxiety, and chronic pain.  In just fifteen minutes a day, Roxburgh s 21-day program will guide you through a simple series of unique rolling techniques that target ten primary areas of the body, including the shoulders, chest, arms, legs, hips, butt, back, and stomach. The result is a healthy, balanced, aligned body that not only looks but feels fantastic.

Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside out

by Marci Shimoff

What would it take to make you happy? A fulfilling career, a big bank account, or the perfect mate? What if it didn’t take anything to make you happy? What if you could experience happiness from the inside out— no matter what’s going on in your life? 

In Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out, transformational expert Marci Shimoff offers a breakthrough approach to being happy. Incorporating the latest findings in positive psychology, powerful tools, and techniques, and moving real-life stories, this life-changing 7-step program will raise your “ happiness set-point.” You don’t have to have happy genes, win the lottery, or lose twenty pounds. This book will enable you to experience more unconditional happiness in your life— starting today!

Happiness is a core state we all seek to achieve. Thanks, in part, to the Positive Psychology movement, happiness has taken center stage and is now the focus of a significant amount of attention. On a recent visit to a large, chain bookstore, I noticed one whole table devoted to books related to happiness. It appears that a happiness movement is underway. If you are just starting out on your happiness journey, or you would like additional guidance in this area, this book would be a good book for you to read. This book is both engaging and easy to read. The authors combine research findings, tools and techniques, and stories to introduce the reader to the concept of happiness and more importantly, the steps you can undertake to achieve greater internally driven happiness and therefore, unconditional happiness in your life.

The Whole30 Cookbook: 150 Delicious and Totally Compliant Recipes to Help You Succeed with the Whole30 and Beyond

 by Melissa Hartwig

The groundbreaking Whole30 program has helped countless people  transform their lives by bringing them better sleep, more energy, fewer cravings, weight loss, and new healthy habits that last a lifetime. In this cookbook, best-selling author and Whole30 co-creator Melissa Hartwig delivers over 150 all-new recipes to help readers prepare delicious, healthy meals during their Whole30 and beyond.

Whether you’ve done the Whole30 once or five times—or just want to make a variety of satisfying, nourishing meals—this book will inspire you to change your life in 30 days with the Whole30 program.

Food Freedom Forever gives you everything you need for achieving dietary success, for today and for the rest of your healthy life. Melissa Hartwig’s information is spot on in terms of its scientific validity, and wonderfully approachable in terms of its implementation. — DAVID PERLMUTTER, MD, Author, #1 New York Times Bestseller, Grain Brain