Finding a diet that aligns with your lifestyle can be difficult, with an endless exhaustive list of factors to consider and a different diet cropping up each week. With awareness to personal well-being at an all-time high, we now know that wellness isn’t just exercising and healthy eating but extends to the habits and mindful practices we form. Preparing your own meals can be great for combatting stress and burnout, but if you’re not a culinary comforter by nature, here are five healthy recipe books to help you forget about the takeaway menu.
The Pleasures of Eating Well by Christina Ong
Basking underneath the tropical sun and practising yoga in an arrestingly breathtaking location might end once the retreat is over but the detoxifying and nutritious cuisine at the COMO hotels, a part of the resort’s bespoke wellness programme, COMO Shambhala, can be brought to the comforts of home with The Pleasures of Eating Well, a collection of 140 resort-inspired recipes thought up by COMO founder Christina Ong and her culinary team. Bringing the idea of intuitive eating to life, the cookbooks’ recipes take a holistic approach to healthy eating, with dishes incorporating several perspectives of what it means to dine and live well. Flavourful and vibrant, the meals prepared with the recipes are indicative of COMO’s approach of wellness.
See also: Retreat Recipes: COMO Shambhala’s Healthy Eggs Florentine Alternative
The Itsu Cookbook
Offering a fresh take on Asian-inspired food, the UK restaurant group Itsu makes it effortless to impress dinner guests (or yourself) with creative recipes you’ll find yourself reaching for over the takeout menu. Dedicating itself to light, low-calorie dishes Itsu’s recipes are still dense in flavour and nutrition, using Asian ingredients as its base for healthy eating. Each of the cookbook’s 100 recipes can all be prepared under 30 minutes, making it ideal for a mid-week fix or meal prep in the mornings.
Salad Samurai
Salads can get boring, quick. Promising that a mixture of whole foods, high-protein and seasonal ingredients can turn the bland salad into the healthy pièce de résistance of home-cooked meals, the recipes in Salad Samurai teaches you how to dress up your greens in over 100 ways. Versatile and vegetarian-friendly, the recipes come from Terry Hope Romero, the brains behind the bestselling vegan cookbook Veganomicon but rest assured, you won’t need to wait for Meatless Mondays to try these recipes out.
Batch by Joel McCharles and Dana Harrison
Elevate your home-cooked meals by serving them with your own preserves. The Batch cookbook by Well Preserved’s Joel McCharles and Dana Harrison explains the method of preservation and how to use it in everyday cooking making it simple to integrate with a healthy meal plan. Coupled with recipes and the different styles of preservation, the Batch cookbook is a must-read for anyone looking to save a few trips to the grocery store and cut down on food waste.
Mediterranean Harvest
There’s been a lot of talk surrounding the Mediterranean diet, which is widely considered one of the healthiest in the world and is a favourite of Global Wellness Summit panellist and Rocco Forte’s Wellness Director Irene Forte. The mainstays of the Mediterranean diet are whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds so preparing meals for it might require some out of the box thinking. With this in mind, Martha Shulman, author of Mediterranean Harvest, has created inherently nutritious recipes to be relished. Inspired by the research done in her travels, the cookbook doubles as a love letter to the vibrant affairs of the Mediterranean sea and its neighbouring country.
Want a little extra help with your diet? Find culinary creativity on a nutritional retreat — find more on Compare Retreats today.
