The Flexitarian Diet: The Mostly Vegetarian Way to Lose Weight, Be Healthier, Prevent Disease, and Add Years to Your Life by Dawn Jackson BlatnerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Flexitarian Diet by Dawn Jackson Blatner, RD, LDN is an easy to understand book about how to get the health benefits of a vegetarian diet while still eating the foods you love. The key to all of this is moderation, and not feeling guilty about the occasional indulgences in meat and sweets. This message resonates throughout the book and really helps to make a vegetarian diet more accessible for most people.
This book is very simple and straightforward, perfect if you are just beginning to think about changing to a vegetarian diet. The book offers a 5 flex food group plan to get you started. Each section describes the important food groups that make up the bulk of a healthy vegetarian diet, such as beans, fruits and vegetables, dairy, grains, and sweets. Each chapter gives a run down of the foods included in each category, how to cook them, and how to get more of them into your diet. There are also menu plans to help guide you toward healthy eating plus lists of foods to keep in your pantry. The information is very basic so is great for beginners. If you are someone with more knowledge of vegetarian eating or already a vegetarian, this book will give you very little new information.
The second half of the book is filled with recipes. There are recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They are very easy to understand and quick to make. Some are so easy that they could not be considered actual recipes, but more like ideas of foods you could through together that are nutritionally adequate. The recipes only make one serving so if you want to make a meal for four or more people you would need to quadruple the ingredients. When quadrupled some of the recipes become cumbersome and do not work out well. Most of the recipes are a good base for creating healthy vegetarian meals and you can add your own twist to them.
The last chapter is an explanation of getting more physical activity in your life. It is a decent chapter with good information on how to get started with exercise, how to stay motivated, and various tools you need to accomplish your goals. There is also a very good section on beating exercise barriers. This section addresses the most common barriers and give tips on how to overcome them. The tips are sensible and are things anyone can try.
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