Why eating healthily doesn’t have to be boring- Book review
“If you make it yourself from these recipes, you can eat donuts, brownies, mac’n’cheese, and pancakes along with a bunch of other stuff that would otherwise be totally off limits for a diabetic, a weight watcher, or a heart patient.” — Lynne Parmiter Bowman
Eating brownies and diabetes is the opposite of what any doctor would tell you to do. And yet, Lynne Parmiter Bowman, author of Brownies for Breakfast, A Cookbook for Diabetics and the People Who Love Them finds healthy ways to make delicious brownies and pancakes out of vegetables because she believes that anyone who wants to feel good and stay away from chronic diseases should eat as if they were a type 2 diabetic and move their bodies often.
Having been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, Bowman agreed with what health experts from the Mayo Clinic had to say: “healthy lifestyle choices can help prevent type 2 diabetes … even if you have diabetes in your family. If you’ve already received a diagnosis of diabetes, you can use healthy lifestyle choices to help prevent complications. If you have prediabetes, lifestyle changes can slow or stop the progression to diabetes.”
As a result, Bowman wrote and published Brownies for Breakfast, a cookbook full of mouth-watering recipes accompanied by vibrant pictures of foods that are as appetizing and appealing as a virtual walk through the world’s most abundant farmer’s market.
Bowman’s three-word diet: EAT REAL FOOD
Eating real food can seem daunting, but Bowman has 12 ways to make it happen:
- Sit down when you eat.
- Eat leafy things two to three times a day, such as her pesto on page 105.
- Replace sugar with healthy sweeteners, such as monk fruit, chicory root, erythritol, stevia, xylitol, and yacon syrup to name just a few of them on page 40. Don’t eat or drink sugar!
- Eat vegetables at every meal.
- Always carry a small bag of healthy snacks with you everywhere you go.
- Eat before you meet, for bad decisions are born out of hunger.
- Stick with basic black, which means no sugar, milk, or cream in your coffee or tea.
- Eat your fruit whole, such as a whole orange, which has fiber and a glass of orange juice does not.
- Eat early, preferably by 5 p.m. so that you give your digestive system a chance to do its job.
- Sleep, for your body, can only heal and cleanse itself while sleeping.
- Read the label! Always!
- Go ahead and cheat a little, such as adding a few drops of maple syrup to your pumpkin pancakes.
As a single mom of three children, Bowman wanted all her recipes to be quick, easy, and inexpensive, such as the genius soup that I whipped out, or I should say boiled out, a few days ago with veggies that I already had in my refrigerator, including organic beets that I buy often at Trader Joe’s. Following the recipe in the book, I made my soup with gluten-free shell macaroni that absorbed the flavor of my dark leafy vegetables; it was delicious and nutritious.
“Soup is about the only practical way to get all the nutrition you need into your life. You do some work upfront and reap the rewards for days and weeks.” — Lynne Parmiter Bowman
From start to finish, from shopping and growing your food to cooking and sharing the wonderful cooking with friends and family, Bowman’s beautiful and well-written book shows us that cooking can add joy and many more happy years to our lives.
So go ahead and eat that brownie or donut without any guilt. Bowman will teach you how to make them delicious and healthy. Just buy her book and try new recipes.
To find out more about Lynne Parmiter Bowman, please listen to the full episode on Seeds of Sunshine.
Seeds of Sunshine is Carmen Micsa’s multigenerational podcast that she started together with her daughter Sophia.
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