Meredith Youngson - Super Tonics: 75 Adaptogen-Packed Recipes to Boost Immunity, Sleep, Beauty, and Wellness

Text copyright 2023 by Meredith Youngson

Photographs copyright 2023 by Jocelynne Flor

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

TenSpeed.com

RandomHouseBooks.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Simultaneously published in Canada by Appetite by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

Photographs on by Jules Lee.

Print typefaces: Letter Omegas Grafical, Latinotypes Recoleta, and Set Sail Studios Better Times

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trade Paperback ISBN9781984861672

Ebook ISBN9781984861689

Acquiring editors: Dervla Kelly and Rachel Brown | Editors: Kim Keller and Rachel Brown

Production editor: Terry Deal

Print designer: Nicole Sarry | Art director: Emma Campion | Print production designer: Mari Gill

Photographers: Jocelynne Flor (food) and Jules Lee (lifestyle)

Print production manager: Jane Chinn | Print prepress color manager: Nick Patton

Copyeditor: Carey Jones | Proofreaders: Kathy Brock and Rachel Markowitz

Indexer: Ken DellaPenta

Publicist: Natalie Yera | Marketer: Andrea Portanova

Ebook production manager: Jessica Arnold

rhid_prh_6.0_143034194_c0_r0

contents

preface

It all began in 2011 with a blueberry-almond smoothie and a fifteen-dollar blenderone of those handheld immersion kinds most people use for soup. I had the idea to combine almond milk, frozen blueberries, and oats to create a healthy beverage that would energize my tired college-student brain. This simple act of self-care was revelatory to me in that moment.

At twenty-one, I was overwhelmed, insecure, and uninspired by the path I was on. I was struggling to keep up with my demanding college program, and my yearslong battle with chronic dieting and disordered eating was taking its toll on my mental and physical health.

As a tween growing up in the 1990s, body-positivity leaders, mental wellness advocates, and proud feminists werent celebrated in the media like they are today. I worshipped Seventeen and Cosmo magazines for teaching me how to do a smoky eye, and I browsed skinny girl Tumblr accounts to learn all the ways to get by on less food.

Luckily, by 2011, conversations around food were moving from low calorie and portion control to vibrant, nutrient-dense whole foods, and I discovered the amazing world of healthy food blogs. Inspiring, trailblazing women behind websites like Oh She Glows, My New Roots, The First Mess, Ambitious Kitchen , and This Rawsome Vegan Life werent telling us how to lose weightthey were celebrating delicious, feel-good food and the joy of being in the kitchen. This was life-changing to me. This sparked my own Oprah aha moment to start recognizing food as fuel, fun, and nourishment rather than a means for punishment and control.

In my own kitchen, where I had little experience (besides the sandwich skills my roommates loved me for), I wanted to teach myself everything about healthy eating and cooking. I pumped buckwheat banana bread, lentil meatballs, quinoa granola, spirulina smoothies, and spiralized noodles out of my kitchen daily. I traded my calorie tracker for a plant-based diet and kept my bowl full of dark leafy greens. With plenty of energy and a new lease on life, I just had to share this passion with others (or at least show off my awesome super-seed cookie recipe). With that, my first food blog Peachy Clean Eats was born. Through the twists and turns of my early twenties, creating and sharing these recipes was my hobbyand escapefrom the underlying anxiety and low self-esteem I was struggling with.

Wanting to make my love of nutrition official, in 2014 I went back to the books to become a registered holistic nutritionist in Toronto. I wholeheartedly soaked up my nutrition studies while sharing my healthy living tips and recipes on my blog and Instagram. Back then, the plant-based online community was small but supportive, and I enthusiastically posted my daily green smoothie bowl or lentil salad. Solidifying my passion for plants, I worked alongside an incredible raw food chef, Barbara Maccaroni, as she opened her restaurant B.Love Conscious Eatery, which served up some of the first raw vegan food Hamilton, Ontario, had to offer. Through watching Barbara make her creations (and tasting them!), I learned just how beautiful, flavorful, and gratifying plant-based food could be.

My hard work churning out recipes paid off in 2016, when I landed my dream job developing recipes for a leading meal kit company. In this role I was able to learn how to complement my plant-based recipe approach with classic flavor pairings and cooking techniques. I learned all I could from my talented, professionally trained chef colleagues and tested hundreds of recipes a year that made it to hundreds of thousands of plates. However, my mental health struggles were far from over, and the stress from starting a new job turned my anxiety and depression up to full volume.

I pulled away from friends and was terrified of Mondays, and spontaneous fits of tears were the norm. I felt brokenlike something was wrong with me and needed fixing. I either had to quit my dream job and move back home with my parents to feel safe again, or I had to get better.

So I decided to try to get better. I started seeing a therapist, listened to TED Talks and read Bren Brown books in the tub, went on long walks with inspirational podcasts, took manifestation courses, and borrowed dozens of self-development books from the library. After months of absorbing these positive sources of brain food, I was able to develop a healthy perspective and the coping skills to help manage my day-to-day anxiety. I focused on self-compassion over perfection. I was inspired to work toward living an amazingnot just safelife.

Feeling all the benefits of these self-care techniques, I started considering how our diets and our thoughts around food impact our mental health. It hurt me to realize this, but I eventually came to terms with the fact that my peachy clean vegan diet was just another sneaky method of control and restriction. After (painfully) ripping off the vegan label and slowly letting go of the shame behind good and bad foods, I completely opened up the gates of my diet and began eating intuitively. I continued to enjoy the delicious plant foods I loved (and still do) but without the title of Super Healthy Vegan Girl. I fried eggs in butter, consumed white sugar without cringing, and attended parties without packing my own protein bar. It felt incredibly freeing and allowed me to fully explore my love affair with food. I reevaluated my mission and mantra and created my current food blog Earth & Oven which celebrates my passion for exploring the intersection of plant-based nutrition, wellness, flavor, fun, and decadence.

As a part of my eating-for-joy adventure, I began researching different foods that promote happiness and reduce stress, and that led me to the power of herbs, teas, and tonics. Could an all-natural herbal tea also work as an anxiety aid? It sounded amazing to this plant-loving nutritionist. So I began experimenting with tea blends to bolster my anxiety-busting toolbox. Being a foodie and cook, it was important to me that the blends were as delicious as they were functional. There were enough teas out there that tasted like grassno thank you.