Woodward - Deliciously Ella Every Day: Quick and Easy Recipes for Healthy Snacks, Packed Lunches, and Simple Meals

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eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com This book is dedicated to all the amazing people who love and follow Deliciously Ella. Im so incredibly grateful for your support and I hope you love this book as much as I do! Healthy living has totally transformed my life and I think it will transform yours, too.

I changed my diet in January 2012 to try to heal a chronic illness called postural tachycardia syndrome. Overnight I adopted a natural, plant-based diet and said good-bye to gluten, dairy, refined sugar, processed food, additives and meat. It was a dramatic change, especially as I had mainly lived off pesto pasta, candy and chocolate up until then... It took a while for the diet to work but, over the course of eighteen months, I got better, came off all my medications and realized that living a healthy life made me happier and healthier than I ever had been before. It wasnt an easy journey, though, and one of the things I found hardest was learning how to eat well when I was really busy and pushed for time. So thats the purpose of this book: to share my tips and tricks to help you build the Deliciously Ella way of eating into your everyday life, so that you can look and feel your best, too.

Taking care of yourself is much easier than you may think and, with a little organization, you can eat amazing, nourishing food all week long, all year round. To me, the most important thing about healthy eating is that the food is always both delicious and do-able. Nourishing your body with goodness needs to fit into your existing lifestyle and not feel like a crazy, overwhelming task. I want to show you how to throw together simple, natural ingredients in just a few minutes to create a fantastic meal and also to help you plan better, so you can always have an awesome, healthy option available to eat throughout the day, whether youre at home or not. In this book Ill introduce you to more than one hundred of my staple dishes, the things that I cook time and time again and the recipes that always make me happy. Ive tried to keep things as quick and easy as possible, with minimal preparation time, so hopefully youll fall in love with the taste and ease of each creation and, over time, these wonderful recipes will become a part of your life.

Im going to share my speedy weekday dinners, from almond butter quinoa, to the best baked sweet potato with garlic mushrooms, to pasta arrabbiata, to new-style nori rolls with avocado cream. Well also explore easy bigger meals, either to serve to all your friends and family, or to be frozen to provide the healthiest ready meals, such as black bean burgers, my favorite sweet potato cakes and chickpea quinoa and turmeric curry. Ive also included a healthy eating on-the-go section, which will spice up your work or school lunches so much that everyone around you will have serious food envy! Plus well go through the best easy breakfasts (think overnight oats, five-minute porridge and maple chia pots), my go-to simple sweet treats (coconut and raspberry mousse, cacao oat and raisin cookies and the best hot chocolate) and lots of amazing salads. So, by the time you finish this book, youll have a whole new range of straightforward go-to meals that will keep you inspired and energized every day! CHANGING YOUR EATING HABITS Shifting toward a more plant-based way of life is pretty exciting; it opens up a whole new world of delicious ingredients, amazing tastes and unique textures and truly makes you feel fabulous from the inside out. But I know that its not the easiest adjustment and that it throws up its own challenges. For me, the biggest hurdle was losing the meals that I had relied on almost every daypesto pasta, cereal, smoked salmon bagels, lasagne and chicken stir-fryand having to find alternatives.

It can be hard at first when old favorites suddenly vanish. Dont worry: youre absolutely not alone in staring at the supermarket shelves having no idea what to buy or what to do with your purchases once you get them home. In fact, it seems to be an issue for almost everyone Ive spoken to who is changing to a plant-based diet. Dont panic! I am here to help. Another issue I found was that I got stuck in a serious food rut. While I absolutely adore food, and eating is probably my favorite pastime, I admit I am naturally a lazy cook.

I like fast, easy meals that taste wonderful but require minimal preparation, chopping and washing up! This disposition, combined with the fact that I didnt know what to cook or how to cook it, meant that I ate the same thing almost every day for the first few months of my plant-based life! Everything tasted good, but I was bored with the lack of variety, which meant that I didnt truly appreciate how amazing plant-based food really is. I only actually fell in love with this way of eating when I pushed myself to try new things, and in doing so I discovered a whole world of rainbow goodness andeven more importantlyI realized that cooking awesome, healthy, varied meals every day was incredibly easy, which is why I wanted to write this book for you. FINDING BALANCE While I hope to persuade you to eat more plant-based goodness, I absolutely dont expect you to only eat this way and I know that almost no one becomes a gluten-free, sugar-free veggie overnight! Im not here to preach or to make anyone feel guilty about enjoying pizza, cheese and chocolate cake; after all, the Deliciously Ella way of eating and living is all about positivity. Instead, I want to make it as easy as possible for you to combine Deliciously Ella recipes with any other kinds of food. I believe that we should all try to nourish our bodies with plant-based food when were at home: for weekday breakfasts, work lunches, Tuesday nights when youre eating in the kitchen... that sort of thing.

These are the times it makes sense to eat the Deliciously Ella way, as youre not having to conform to social conventions at restaurants or eat someone elses food in their home, so you dont have to worry about being rude or different from everybody else. Eating my way at home means your body has a healthy foundation, so you can go for dinner with friends, order what you want and savor it: if you love pizza, order an amazing pizza; if you love cookies, get the best cookie and actually think about and appreciate each bite as you eat. This is the balance Im talking about: healthy moderation. It will make healthy eating so much more accessible rather than trying to eat this way all the time right from the outset. It also means that trying to be super-healthy wont take over your life and stress you out when you dont know what to order from a not-so-healthy restaurant menu. Its important that this balance feel relaxed and easy, rather than you feeling compelled to do a juice cleanse because you ate one too many pieces of chocolate cake the night before!

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