Beauty Bookworms

How many of us vow to get healthy every time New Years rolls around? Scratch that…how many of us vow to get healthy almost every day after we’ve indulged in far too many appetizers at a party or eaten a whole pint of ice cream (that was moi yesterday….damn Blue Mountain Organic Mint Chocolate Chip Ice cream…I don’t even like mint and I ate the whole thing!)? I’m good about 75% off the time, the other quarter my sugar tooth takes hold and I eat an inordinate amount of sweets. What I’m learning though is to not beat myself up about it! We can’t all be at our bottom weight all the time and the most important thing is to maintain a healthy diet and exercise routine to the best of our ability. There are two new books that have helped me in my quest to put my beauty/health routine into perspective – it’s so easy to have a skewed view here in NYC!

The first book is called “Clean Plates, the ultimate guide to healthy, tasty and sustainable eating,” and it’s divided into two parts. The first half of the book tackles lifestyle issues and is packed with helpful information on the various food groups and why, for example, not all meats are created the same or why al dente pasta is better for you then over-cooked pasta. The thing I like most about is that it’s not focused on dieting, it’s about changing how we think about food, the way we eat, and offering easy calorie-saving tips along the way. The second half of the book has a bunch of NYC restaurant reviews written from the perspective of a nutritionist and a food critic. It’s an interesting and useful read and while a lot of it is obvious, there are a bunch of tidbits to pick-up and it definitely tops Zagat for anyone looking to eat healthfully in this neck of the woods! Jump for the second book.

The second book I recently finished reading is called “Sexy Women Eat,” and it was written by the founder of Behind the Burner, Divya Gugnani. Again, there’s a lot of obvious stuff that you can skip through, but there are also a bunch of nuggets that are very helpful for women on-the-go. Among them, Gugnani has some good suggestions for working in gym-time when you have no time to actually go to the gym – think wear an ankle weight around the office, lift a weight while on the phone, do a lunges while blow-drying your hair…nothing ground-breaking, but multi-tasking in that way had never occurred to me before! She’s also got tips for us when we’re ordering take-out, ordering room services, eating-out, etc, and she brings in a lot of funny personal anecdotes that make her very relate-able.

Got any good beauty bookworm suggestions? Please share!