Food and Freedom: Discover Your Personal Recipe To Eat, Think, and Live Well

This book analyzes the mindset and everyday practices that influence eating habits. Nutritionist Van Raes (Health Wise: True Health and Happiness for the Empowered Woman) uses anecdotes from her clients and her own life to demonstrate how relatively simple changes can make major impacts on one’s health. Rather than offering a diet plan and fitness routine (although the book does include a few recipes and yoga exercises), Van Raes elaborates on the reasons behind people’s sometimes rocky relationships with food and offers ways to rectify those approaches and have a more positive relationship with nutrition. In a way, this is a wellness retreat in a book, with plenty of journal prompts and mindfulness exercises to help readers find and ease out of trouble points. Overall the advice is good for anyone, but the book focuses specifically on women, with discussion of how women’s life cycles affect eating habits and health and how to best work within those cycles rather than fight them.