Any mechanic will tell you that in order to keep your car running at peak performance, it needs to be well maintained, treated with care and always given the best fuel available.
When you eat healthy, nutritious food, you give your body the fuel it needs to keep your body's engines up to speed and running top notch.
Eat Away Illness: Strategies and Recipes for Healing is a book everyone should have in their kitchen as it is packed with dozens of healthy recipes from cinnamon buns to teryiaki almonds to quinoa spoon bread. More than just a cookbook it addresses healing foods with emphasis on how to heal physically, emotionally and spirtually.
In this book you will learn about:
- The benefits of dry skin brushing
- Sugar and how it depresses immunity
- The importance of supporting digestion
- What is sub clinical hyporthyroidism and how to test for it
- Emotions and their role in healing
- How to cook beans and more!
We had the opportunity to interview Paulette Millis a registered nutritional consulting practitioner and author of Eat Away Illness: Strategies and Recipes for Healing.
Naturally Savvy Question: What motivated you to write this book?
I was encouraged by the sales of my first book, now a national best seller (Cook Your Way to Health). I wanted people to have an easy time accessing simple straight forward information on how to heal their bodies, taking control of their own health, as it was a lengthy, confusing, and time consuming process for me when I needed to transition from the medical model to healing my body myself.
Naturally Savvy Question: What do you hope people will get out of your book?
Easy to use information on how to walk through a series of steps to heal their body naturally; simplified information on proteins, fats, and carbs; easy to use and tasty recipes using no processed ingredients, no white flour, no sugar.
Naturally Savvy Question: What are some healthy foods and strategies to help eat away illness?
The book contains lots of recipes with fruits and vegetables, many of them raw, as well as good for you essential fats, whole complex carbohydrates, and good quality proteins. Some strategies are building the immune system through body brushing, rebounding, and superior nutrition, as well as detoxifying.
Naturally Savvy Question: Many of your smoothie recipes include avocado. Do people who dislike avocado enjoy these recipes? Does the taste of the avocado blend in well?
Using avocado in smoothies, salad dressings and dips are a great way to increase the essential unsaturated fat in the diet, necessary to heal. When avocado is blended with other ingredients, the result is smooth, thick and creamy, and often unnoticable, due to the flavor of the fruits or vegetables included in the recipe.
Naturally Savvy Question: You mentioned the dangers of a high sugar diet in your book. What natural, healthier alternatives do you recommend? What is your favorite dessert recipe?
I highly recommend eliminating all sugar from the diet, and using natural sweeteners instead. My first choice is fruits, and/or pureed fresh or dried fruit to sweeten baked goods, make raw desserts, or for any other use if possible. Second choice would be the natural sweeteners maple syrup, agave, honey, stevia, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup, beet syrup, all listed in the book.
My favorite dessert recipe is Blueberry Slump, found on page 356. My mother made this with our wild blueberries from Northern Saskatchewan when I was growing up. I altered the recipe to include whole flours and natural sweeteners. This recipe is healthy through and through, good for breakfast! I recommend eating desserts alone, not with the meal, as this is hard on the digestion.
Naturally Savvy Question: What do you think people will find the most surprising from your book?
Probably that the theory and recipies combined are such a great combination. I often get comments on how tasty the recipes are; we can make very good tasting food that does not have processed and/or refined products, as well as being gluten and dairy free if desired, and the recipes are so easy to make.
For more information about Paulette Millis and to purchase her book Eat Away Illness: Strategies and Recipes for Healing visit her website at healingwithnutrition.ca.