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ISBN: Print 978-1-64739-741-8 | eBook 978-1-64739-443-1
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To my Mia and Luka.
Your happiness is my biggest joy in life.
And to my husband, Boris, my rock.
I love the life we have built together.
CONTENTS
M y life growing up in southeastern Europe is something I look back to often. Most of the food we ate was farm-to-table and most meals were home-cooked. We only ate out one or two times a year, if that. We spent our summers and winters in our village house high up in the mountains, where everybody ate only what grew in their yards. Milk was from the cows we took care of, and the meat we ate was wild, caught in the woods.
Fast-forward to the year 2000, when I moved to the United States with my mom. I was 19 years old in a foreign country where everything was super-sized, eating out was the norm, and everyone drove everywhere because walking around was a burden.
I gained more than 10 pounds in my first six months of living in the United States. My drink of choice was a Diet Coke, and although my mom cooked, I loved fast-food restaurants and would visit them frequently. After I started dating my childhood friendwho today is my husbandBoris (who also moved to the United States as a teenager), I started cooking more, but my diet was still very unhealthy. I enjoyed white-flour bagels daily, sandwiches with processed cold cuts at lunch, and endless bowls of home-cooked spaghetti and meatballs at night.
Within a few years, I had two beautiful kids, Mia and Luka. I ate healthy in both of my pregnancies (because books said I should), and I made my own baby food (again, books). It wasnt until my son turned eight months old that my cards started reshuffling. I was exercising more and more (weight training was a big part of my life then, and still is) and I started reading about workouts and about what exactly I was supposed to be eating. The more attention I paid to nutrition, the more benefits I saw, and the more I was intrigued by it. I soon realized that there is a big connection between clean eating and the way I feel. Right around the beginning of my transformation, my husband also started his journey of losing more than 50 pounds. As a family, we embraced the new, healthy lifestyle of being active and nourishing our bodies in the right ways, and we realized that living healthier made us happier.
So, did I discover a new and revolutionary way of living and eating? Not exactly. I just discovered that the successful way I was eating has a name in the United States: clean eating. The core of this way of eating is about consuming fresh fruits and vegetables, high-quality meat and dairy, fewer processed foods, and more home-cooked meals. My meals became smaller and my main hydration was water. I replaced most white-flour foods with whole-wheat and ancient grains, such as quinoa and buckwheat. The super-sized cuts of meats were nowhere to be found at dinnertime. Rather, our plates were filled with rainbows of veggies, wonderful whole grains, and just the right amount of lean meats and good fats. Exercise became a daily routine in our household, and weekends were filled with outdoor play and walks with kids, just like what I remembered from when I was little.
The mental and physical benefits that I experienced in my own life, and my desire to help people feel the way I do, led me to return to school to become a nutrition and health coach. My love for cooking, eating clean, and feeding my family well deepened even more.
At the beginning of our newly found lifestyle, I tried to find a way to healthify all the meals we loved. Chicken Parm was now baked instead of fried, meatballs were made with turkey instead of pork, and high-sugar sodas were replaced with homemade iced teas. Little by little, the new foods that we started eating, and the new recipes we were making, became our favorites. Even more, seeing how clean eating affected me on the deepest level helped make this way of living a lifestyle and not another fad diet.
Because of our busy lives, our meals are often rushed, and we eat standing up or on the go. When we get into this kind of routine, meals become a chore and just fuel. But there are so many benefits to sitting down, chewing food well, and connecting with loved ones at the dinner table. Ive found that not rushing meals helps us develop a better relationship with food. Getting a meal on the table in less than 30 minutes gives me that extra time to actually sit down and enjoy the meal, bond with my kids, or even squeeze in a workout.
