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Updated May 01, 2014.
While this is called a cookbook, a more apt title might be "guidebook" for healthy lifestyle change. So often we know what we should be doing to improve our longevity through daily diet and activity, but actually doing those things is another matter entirely. Based on Cooking Light magazine's "12 Healthy Habits" year-long series on lifestyle change, this book offers a 12-month program to get you eating better, and exercising more, one habit at a time.
The Value of Healthy Habits
As author and registered dietitian Janet Helm writes, "this is not a diet book", rather, a road map to improve your eating and exercise habits. I think its greatest strength is that it offers a number of very specific, tangible strategies to establish and entrench healthy daily routines that support eating well and moving more.
This is where I believe many diet and exercise books fall short: they provide all sorts of directives that require lots of thought and attention. Once life gets busy and you're forced to attend to other priorities, you have no structure to keep those healthy behaviors in place. Yes, it's valuable to know which choices are healthy — but perhaps more effective to remove them from the realm of conscious choice, to the bastion of boring habit instead. The more automatic the action, the more lasting the behavior, because you don't have to weigh whether you want to do it or not, you just do it.
Helm tells me much of the advice is based on new science investigating how habits are formed.
"So many books talk about what we need to do to be healthy: what to eliminate, and avoid, and they demonize certain foods," she says. "This book is all about the 'how', with really specific, concrete steps on how to implement the change into your own life."
So how do you establish strong habits? The book lays out a series of 12 specific instructions, each of which is to be tackled for a period of a month. For example, Habit #1 is "Cook at last three more meals per week". This advice is based on the statistic that eating in a restaurant will typically have you consuming 50% more calories, and will likely ramp up your consumption of salt and saturated fat. This chapter offers strategies to prepare better for home cooking (with advice on what items to keep stocked in your fridge and pantry), as well as how to cook some versatile sauces in advance, to bulk-cook and then freeze for future dinners, and how to cooperate in the kitchen with other family members to make the job of cooking from scratch easier.
In addition, the chapter offers recipes (it is called a cookbook, after all) and ideas for new ingredient pairings such as innovative pizza toppings and lower-calorie and varied options for traditional Mexican meals.
Other chapters focus on building a healthy breakfast each day, eating three servings of whole grains for longevity-boosting fiber, increasing vegetable consumption, and reducing salt intake. Segments in each chapter offer a "coaching session" from an expert in that area of lifestyle change, as well as quotes from readers that highlight day-to-day challenges in making the new habits stick.
How To Use This Book
Helm recommends focusing on one of the prescribed habits at a time, and working on that habit for a full month. While it's not necessary to tackle them in order, some build on others. For example, the first chapter (and habit) promotes cooking more meals at home, and if you get that practice firmly in place, others — like boosting your intake of vegetables or cutting your salt consumption — might be easier to address. By focusing on practicing each habit for a full month, you'll reinforce the patterns to help you stick with it for good.
Read more: Our Stress Guide offers more Advice on How to Form Healthy Habits
Author Helm cautions her book offers no wide-scale quick fix.
"Habit formation is a long-term proposition," she says. "I want people to get off the diet merry-go-round, learn to eat for a lifetime, and establish healthy behaviors to make these habits stick."
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- User-friendly design, easy to follow
- Focuses on building habits rather than results
- Presents a clear action plan for each habit
- Lots of practical tips and tools
- Offers solutions for stumbling blocks you may encounter
- Encourages patience since habits take time to establish
- For readers wanting more structure and sample menus, a 6-week plan is provided
- Promotes trying new things, which can help break down older, less-helpful patterns
Cons:
- Long-term plan might be difficult for some readers to stick with
Bottom line: This is a solid guide to better eating and exercise habits, presented in an engaging and easy-to-follow format. If you're willing to be patient, you'll see results with this as your guidebook.
For more information about the book, you can go to Helm's website Nutrition Unplugged.
Source:
Janet Helm, RD. Cooking Light: The Food Lover's Healthy Habits Cookbook: Great Food and Expert Advice That Will Change Your Life. Oxmoor House. 2012.