BIG FIT GIRL: EMBRACE THE BODY YOU HAVE I QUIT SUGAR: FAST FAMILY MEALS BY SARAH WILSON (MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS, $29.99, AVAILABLE NOW) www.foodtechnology.co.nz 27 THIS MONTH’S LUCKY SUBSCRIBER, Letitia Buckle from Bodco Ltd will receive all three books reviewed on this page. B O O K R E V I E W S In her early 20s, Louise Green had what can only be described as an appalling lifestyle. She drank alcohol like a trooper, smoked cigarettes and regularly ate greasy Chinese food from her local foodcourt. She was sedentary, worked unhappily at a desk job in a downtown lawyers’ office, sat on the couch every night in front of the telly with several glasses of wine; exercised for short periods of time only in desperate attempts to trim down; and woke up every day with a hangover. “I lived this way for nearly a decade,” the now athlete, personal trainer and founder of plus-size fitness boot camp Body Exchange says. “I consumed junk food, alcohol and cigarettes to smother my bad feelings. This only made me more resentful and self-blaming, because I could never reach my ideal self. I thought the only way out was to lose weight and shape myself into the feminine ideal that bombarded me from every direction; if only I too could be a size 4, happiness would shine down on me.” It was only when she hit rock bottom – “a desperate and lonely place to be” – that Green made a conscious decision to change her life. She was 29, and she signed up (with a great deal of trepidation) for a ‘Learn to Run 5K’ offered by her local running store. The rest is history. This book is incredibly inspiring, and an account of how Green – a plus-size woman – stopped dieting and got fit on her own terms. It’s an indictment of how the fitness industry does not meet the needs of plus-size women, but that should not stop you from getting fit… in the body you have. BIG FIT GIRL: EMBRACE THE BODY YOU HAVE BY LOUISE GREEN (GREYSTONE BOOKS, $29.99, AVAILABLE NOW) You might recognise Aussie Sarah Wilson as the woman who famously ‘quit sugar’ in eight weeks or as the former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, but these days she’s merely a New York Times best-selling author and entrepreneur. With a 20-year journalism career spanning more than 20 years, Wilson now describes herself as a blogger on topics such as philosophy, anxiety, minimalism, toxin-free living and anti-consumerism at sarahwilson.com; she lives in Sydney, rides a bike everywhere, hikes and is “eternally curious”, which I guess is why she’s such a high publishing achiever. This cookbook is way more than just a collection of her favourite fast family meals – it is an ode to her childhood. “Mum didn’t cook fancy nor expensive food. It was all about economy – of flavour, time and dollars,” Wilson says. “She’d use budget cuts of meat, make everything in the one big old cast-iron pot, bulk things out with starchy veggies and ensure we had three serves of greens with every meal. It’s how all six of us kids learned to cook – and to truly dine.” If you’re after family meals that cost $5 per serve, Friday fun food for kids and adults, fast family fixes and easy weekday dinners, how to cook a Sunday roast and divide up the leftovers, or indulgent after-dinner treats, this book offers mindful, sustainable and economical practices…and all sugar-free. Boy, I love a good autobiography, but they can be few and far between in the world of food. So when this substantial offering from one of the world’s global authorities on Asian food hit my table, I was reasonably excited. Ken Hom’s name is synonymous with success – a plethora of 38 cookbooks inspiring millions of home cooks – but there’s way more to the man than just food. At eight months of age, Hom’s father died and his mother raised him in the punishing hand-to-mouth slums of Chicago’s Chinatown; at 11, he landed a job in his uncle’s Chinese restaurant; his first book Chinese Technique was published in America in 1981; eight million Ken Hom woks are now located in one-in-seven British kitchens; and he now describes himself as a presenter, author, restauranteur and cook. “This is a story about food and its ability to inspire,” he says. “It is the story of how food shaped my life, beginning as a child fed by a mother who had little but sacrificed all that she had. I was a minute speck in a tiny corner of Chicago, and part of the minority that kept themselves to themselves in Chinatown. Head down, button up. I did not set goals. That has never been my way. Instead, I relied on the virtuous belief, instilled in me by my mother and my Chinese-American relatives, that if I was good, then good things might happen to me. They did and they have. Thank God.” I QUIT SUGAR: FAST FAMILY MEALS KEN HOM, MY STIR-FRIED LIFE KEN HOM, MY STIR-FRIED LIFE BY KEN HOM OBE (NEWSOUTH BOOKS, $47.99, AVAILABLE NOW)
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