Winter is often the season of comfort foods and, in much of the Western world, there’s a holiday season slide of forgotten diets and instead sugar, alcohol, pastry, and the like.

What de Thample does here is an antidote to all that, without sacrificing happiness and celebration.

Before the recipes get started, she has a chapter on “food as medicine“, and to our immense surprise, proceeds to detail, accurately, many categories such as

• Foods for immune health
• Foods against inflammation
• Foods for gut health
• Foods against aging
• Foods for energy levels
• Foods against anxiety
• Foods for hormonal balance

…and so forth, with lists of ingredients that fit into each category.

Then in the rest of the book, she lays out beautiful recipes for wonderful dishes (and drinks) that use those ingredients, without unhealthy additions.

The recipes are, by the way, what could best be categorized as “fancy”. However, they are fancy in the sense that they will be impressive for entertaining, and (again, to our great surprise) they don’t actually call for particularly expensive/rare ingredients, nor for arcane methods and special equipment.Instead, everything’s astonishingly accessible to put together and easy to execute.

Bottom line: if you’d like to indulge this winter, but would like to do so healthily, this is an excellent way to do so.

Click here to check out Winter Wellness, and level-up your seasonal health and happiness!

We’ve written before about depression and “flourishing” but what about when one isn’t exactly flourishing, but is not necessarily in the depths of depression either? That’s what this book is about.

Prof. Keyes offers, from his extensive research, hope for those who do not check enough of the boxes to be considered depressed, but who are also definitely more in the lane of “surviving” than “thriving”.

Specifically, he outlines five key ways to make the step from languishing to flourishing, based not on motivational rhetoric, but actual data-based science:

1. Learn (creating your personal story of self-growth)
2. Connect (building relationships, on the individual level and especially on the community level)
3. Transcend (developing psychological resilience to the unexpected)
4. Help (others! This is about finding your purpose, and then actively living it)
5. Play (this is a necessary “recharge” element that many people miss, especially as we get older)

With regard to finding one’s purpose being given the one-word summary of “help”, this is a callback to our tribal origins, and how we thrive and flourish best and feel happiest when we have a role to fulfil and provide value to those around us)

Bottom line: if you’re not at the point of struggling to get out of bed each day, but you’re also not exactly leaping out of bed with a smile, this book can help get you from one place to the other.

Click here to check out Languishing, and flourish instead!

We all know that growing our own veg is ultimately not only healthier on the plate, but also a very healthy activity. Cheaper too. So why don’t more of us do it?

For many of us, it’s a matter of not having the skills or knowledge to do so. This book bridges that knowledge-gap.

Richards gives, as promised, a month-by-month well-illustrated guide to growing a wide variety of vegetables. He does, by the way, assume that we are in a temperate climate in the Northern Hemisphere. So if you’re not, you may need to make some adjustments.

The book doesn’t assume prior knowledge, and does give the reader everything we need from an initial basic shopping list onwards.

A particular strength of this book is that it’s about growing veg in a single raised bed—this ensures keeping everything very manageable.

Bottom line: if you have ever thought it would be good to grow your own veg, but didn’t know where to start and want something practical for a beginner, this is an excellent guide that will get you going!

Click here to check out Veg In One Bed; you can do it!