Eat better, feel better : my recipes for wellness and healing, inside and out /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Boost gut health and immunity with a delicious approach to wellness that nourishes mind, body, and spirit.

Get an inside look at Giada's approach to healthy, balanced living. In her newest book, Giada walks you through how to select food that can actually make you feel better and curate a personalized wellness routine to support a healthy mind and body. Find out how reconfiguring her diet to control inflammation can turn your life around and how to use complementary wellness tactics like intermittent fasting, meditation, and other self-care routines to optimize your well-being.

Giada devotes an entire chapter to her 3-day reboot (that she follows several times a year) and offers more than two dozen dairy-free, sugar-free, and gluten-free recipes to accompany the plan as well as a 21-day menu outline that makes cooking for good easy to implement at home. Eat Better, Feel Better features more than 100 new recipes like Quinoa Pancakes; Sheet Pan Parmesan Shrimp and Veggies; Roasted Cauliflower and Baby Kale Salad; Grilled Strip Steak with Scallion Salsa Verde; and Chocolate and Orange Brown Rice Treats along with plenty of Italian-influenced recipes fans will look forward to, from Fusilli with Chicken and Broccoli Rabe to Easy Chicken Piccata and Pan-Roasted Pork Chops with Cherry and Red Wine Sauce.

Eat Better, Feel Better is the perfect jumpstart to wellness.Your path to feeling better begins now.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Introduction This book is the culmination of a ten-year journey, an exploration that not so coincidentally took place between my fortieth and fiftieth birthdays. Over the last decade I've made a conscious effort to take control of my health because it had finally become impossible to ignore the fact that the choices (or lack thereof) I'd been making for the past twenty years just weren't working for me anymore. A lot of factors brought me to this point. My forties were an incredible career-building period: I opened three restaurants and launched a website and e-commerce business, all while shooting multiple cooking shows in LA, NYC, and Italy and raising a daughter as a single mom. It seemed the harder I worked, the more opportunities I was offered, and I didn't want to let any of them slip away. But each new obligation meant I was spread a little thinner--always on a plane, in a car, grabbing what food and rest I could when I could. I was chronically sleep deprived, and a couple of minutes on a hotel treadmill were as close as I came to an exercise routine. Some days I barely ate enough to keep me going. I was finally attaining the kind of success I'd never even dreamed of, but a lot of the time I was too depleted to enjoy it. And let's not forget, as a woman, knocking on the door of fifty brings its own special challenges. Along with the wisdom of experience and a newfound confidence come the joys of a slower metabolism, hormonal fluctuations, and a host of physical changes, from loss of muscle mass to deepening crows' feet and wrinkles. And it's not only those of us who spend many of our days with a camera pointed in our direction who struggle with these changes; everyone wants to look and feel their best. Tricks that had always helped me cope under pressure and compensate for too much travel, interrupted sleep, irregular and sometimes unhealthy meals--usually sugar in some form--now just made me feel more exhausted. Stress was omnipresent. My digestion became so sluggish and unpredictable that some days I could barely function. On top of that, my immunity was shot; I found myself getting sick constantly, and I couldn't bounce back the way I did when I was younger. I just felt like I had nothing left in the tank. I realized that if I didn't prioritize my health above the hundred other things vying for my attention, I would only continue to feel worse, not better. So, I made changes to the way I eat--big ones. I learned to really listen to my gut and, more importantly, to respect what it was telling me instead of ignoring it or trying to figure out a workaround that would let me eat the way I always had. I came up with a program that gave my digestive system a chance to recover and heal (more on that on page 57), and an approach to eating that let my body work a little less hard at processing what I ate so it could spend more of its resources on keeping me healthy and active. I'm not a doctor, and I don't pretend to have all the answers, but one thing I know for sure is that I feel better today than I did at thirty-five. I wasn't far into this journey before it became crystal clear to me that it all starts with food. Once I rethought the way I ate and how my body processes the fuel I feed it, it was easier to fit restorative practices like meditation, consistent exercise, and better sleep into my life. The funny thing was, far from making my days feel even more overscheduled, these self-care efforts actually created more room and freedom in my life--because I felt good so much more of the time, I had more productive hours in a day. None of this transformation would have been possible without true and lasting changes to what I eat and how I think about food. In this book I share the recipes and philosophy that I followed--and continue to practice--to reset my digestive health, restore my gut's ability to work at peak capacity, and keep my immune system strong. My approach minimizes foods known to cause inflammation and nurtures the delicate ecosystem of the gut rather than stressing it out with toxins and irritants. And while this is not a weight- loss plan, I wouldn't be surprised if prioritizing some of these gut-friendly foods for a few weeks--or longer, if you like the way they make you feel--results in a corresponding de -emphasis on the foods that make you feel clogged up, bogged down, and heavy (spoiler: many of them are high in fat, carbs, and calories!). If you eat well most of the time, you may also find that when you do stray (it happens to the best of us), recovery will become more intuitive and less depleting. Most of us will live to a ripe old age these days; the question is, what quality of life will you enjoy along the way? Wherever you are on this journey, you face a crossroads every time you put dinner on the table, or choose to flip through your phone rather than do a few minutes of yoga or meditation. I'm here to be your guide, your rooting section, and your translator as you learn to listen to your gut and use that feedback to chart your own path to wellness. I'm not gonna lie; it's not easy to change the way you think about food, but I'm better for it every day, and you will be too. In the chapters that follow you'll find a wealth of flavorful and uncomplicated recipes that will help reset your gut, twenty-one days of meal plans to help you make eating smarter a habit rather than a "diet," and all the lessons I've learned about what makes me feel stronger, healthier, and well fed, in both senses of the word. Buon appetito--and buona salute! Xo, Gida Excerpted from Eat Better, Feel Better: My Recipes for Wellness and Healing, Inside and Out by Giada De Laurentiis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Giada De Laurentiis was born on August 22, 1970 in Rome, Italy. She received a bachelor's degree in social anthropology from UCLA and studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, France. After returning to the United States, she became a professional chef working in several Los Angeles restaurants including the Wolfgang Puck-owned Spago. She started her own catering company GDL Foods and worked as a food stylist. She was contacted by the Food Network after styling a piece in Food & Wine Magazine in 2002. She is the star of Food Network's Everyday Italian, Giada's Weekend Getaways, and Giada at Home. She has written several cookbooks including Everyday Italian: 125 Simple and Delicious Recipes, Giada's Family Dinners, Everyday Pasta, Giada's Kitchen: New Italian Favorites, Giada at Home: Family Recipes from Italy and California, Giada's Feel Good Food: My Healthy Recipes and Secrets, and Giada's Italy: My Recipes for La Dolce Vita.

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