عن المؤلف | Lisa Bryan is the founder of the popular blog and corresponding YouTube channel Downshiftology. Lisa has been featured in Well + Good, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, The Kitchn, and Elle. She lives in Southern California, where she hikes, bikes, and enjoys all things healthy. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionI’ll be honest, I never imagined that one day I’d write a cookbook. But then again, I also never imagined that I’d create a food blog or plaster my face across YouTube videos for millions of people around the world to see. Life is funny that way, isn’t it? When I first started Downshiftology, my goal was humble and simple―to inspire people to eat more vegetables, to cook from home more frequently, and to ditch processed food. I’m not a professional chef (or even a trained chef for that matter). I’m a former burned-out corporate gal who struggled to balance life and healthy eating while dealing with several autoimmune conditions and an overly sensitive gut. I’m an introvert, albeit a chatty one, who reluctantly started my YouTube channel to appease a few blog readers who asked for tutorial videos, and then I chuckled to myself at how silly it was for a forty-something to be starting a YouTube channel (I mean, I was double the age of the average YouTuber!). Somewhere along the way, though, my moderate, mostly antiinflammatory, and certainly not-perfect approach to eating clicked with a few of you, and then a few more, and before I knew it, what started out with me saying, “Oh, I’ll just toss a few recipes on a website and cobble together a few videos” turned into my full-time job.my wellness journey I thought I was generally healthy for most of my life. Which kind of makes me laugh now, considering my diet was the “standard American diet,” full of processed food, fast food, sugar, and hardto-pronounce ingredients. I was fairly active and assumed that because I was not overweight, I was healthy. Never in a million years did I correlate food and lifestyle with health. In my twenties, my main nourishment came from fast food and processed food, with McDonald’s double cheeseburgers and Taco Bell Mexican pizzas always at the top of my list. I was also quite the sugar fiend and had a massive addiction to anything sweet and sugary, like candy, cakes, and pastries. I even thought about opening a bakery for a while! In my thirties, my career progressed and I climbed the corporate ladder as an executive for healthcare companies. High levels of stress, long hours, and reduced sleep were now added to my lifestyle mix. Without really realizing it, I had become the quintessential type A corporate workaholic, grabbing coffee and snacks while running between meetings. At this same time, mysterious symptoms were increasingly appearing. I had seasonal allergies for the first time in my life, gastrointestinal issues, and dry patches of skin on my legs and face. I suffered from dizziness and fainting episodes, as well as hormonal imbalances. But it was the massive fatigue that really got me. I’d go to bed at 8 p.m., sleep for ten hours, and still be tired the next day. I visited several doctors and underwent lots of testing but was told that other than low blood pressure, I was the epitome of good health. I received inhalers for the asthma and corticosteroids for the skin issues and was sent on my way. But deep in my core, I knew something was off. So I became a late-night Google-oholic and began connecting the dots myself. At the age of thirty-five, I received my first autoimmune diagnosis―celiac disease. From there, other diagnoses rolled in one after the other―Hashimoto’s, psoriasis, and endometriosis―all within two years! As you can imagine, my world was flipped upside down.the importance of real food and lifestyle After I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I did just about everything wrong. |