Blog Archives
Bridging the Gap
Empowered Kitchen brings together physicians, chefs, dietitians, and farmers to show how plant-forward cooking can nourish personal health, strengthen communities, and support a healthier planet. What motivated you to publish this book?
What motivated me was the desire to bridge the gap between knowing what is good for our health and actually putting that knowledge into practice in our everyday lives.
As a physician and chef, I’ve always believed that food is one of the most powerful tools we have to improve our health. Yet, knowing what to eat and knowing how to prepare nourishing, delicious meals are two very different things. I wanted to create something that could help people connect those dots.
With Empowered Kitchen, I also wanted to bring together different voices from across the health and food communities. We have 31 contributors, including physicians, chefs, dietitians, and farmers, each bringing their own experiences, expertise, and perspectives.
Ultimately, this book is about making healthy eating more approachable, enjoyable, and sustainable. It’s about showing people that small changes in our kitchens can have a meaningful impact on our personal health, our communities, and the planet. I hope readers walk away feeling inspired and empowered to make their kitchens a place where positive change begins.
You open the book with memories of your parents cooking together. How did those experiences shape your understanding of food as a communal practice?
Some of my earliest and fondest memories of food come from watching my parents cook together. Growing up, the kitchen was more than just a place where meals were prepared. It was where people came together, shared responsibilities, exchanged stories, and showed their love through food.
Looking back, I realize that those experiences shaped how I view food today. Food has always been about more than its nutritional value. It’s also about connection, culture, relationships, and the memories we create around the table.
As I’ve grown in my work as a physician and chef, I’ve come to appreciate how important that communal aspect of food is to our overall well-being. Sharing meals can strengthen relationships, create a sense of belonging, and encourage healthier habits within families and communities.
That’s something I wanted to carry into Empowered Kitchen. I hope it reminds people that nourishing ourselves doesn’t have to be an individual pursuit. It can be something we experience and build together.
The book brings together doctors, chefs, dietitians, and farmers. How did their different perspectives influence your approach to connecting nutrition, cooking, and sustainability?
One of the things I love most about this book is that it brings together people who approach food from very different perspectives, but share a common vision.
As a physician, I naturally look at food through the lens of health and disease prevention. Chefs bring the creativity, flavour, and techniques that make nourishing food enjoyable. Dietitians help translate nutritional science into practical guidance, while farmers remind us where our food comes from and how our choices affect the environment and food systems.
Bringing these perspectives together helped us tell a much bigger story about food. Nutrition doesn’t exist in isolation. What we grow, how we prepare our meals, what we choose to eat, and how we share food with others are all interconnected.
I also wanted the book to go beyond simply providing recipes. Alongside more than 50 plant-forward recipes, we included practical strategies and insights from our contributors to help readers understand the bigger picture.
I think that’s what makes Empowered Kitchen special. It demonstrates that healthier people, stronger communities, and a healthier planet can all be part of the same conversation.
Many readers struggle to maintain healthy eating habits amid busy schedules and family obligations. What practical changes do you believe make the greatest difference?
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about healthy eating is that it has to be complicated, time-consuming, or expensive. In reality, some of the most impactful changes can be quite simple.
First, start by incorporating more whole plant foods into your meals. Think beans, lentils, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. You don’t necessarily have to overhaul your entire diet overnight. Even making small substitutions or adding more plant foods to meals you’re already familiar with can make a difference.
Second, make your kitchen work for you. Planning a few meals ahead, keeping nutritious pantry staples on hand, and preparing some ingredients in advance can make healthier choices much easier when life gets busy.
Third, focus on consistency rather than perfection. Healthy eating isn’t about following a rigid set of rules or getting every meal right. It’s about building habits that are realistic enough to maintain over time.
And finally, make food enjoyable and something you can share with others. Involve your family in cooking, try new recipes together, and find meals that everyone looks forward to eating.
That’s really the philosophy behind Empowered Kitchen. We want people to feel that healthy eating is achievable in their everyday lives. You don’t need a perfect kitchen or hours of free time. You just need to start somewhere, and small changes can add up to something meaningful over time.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website
Your body wasn’t designed to be broken. It was designed to heal.
In Empowered Kitchen, you’ll discover how the food on your plate becomes a daily act of healing—not just for your body, but for your family, community, and planet. Written by physicians, registered dietitians, farmers, and chefs who’ve dedicated their careers to this work, this isn’t another preachy nutrition book. It’s an invitation back to the kitchen.
What’s Inside:
The Science of Real Food — Learn why chronic disease is climbing and how whole, diverse, fiber-rich plant foods can rewire your body and rewire your health at the cellular level. Discover the truth about the foods keeping you sick and the ones that can save your life.
The Ripple Effect — See how your food choices ripple outward to farmers, waterways, soil health, and climate. Understand the broken food system and how to vote with your fork.
Recipes That Actually Work — These are real, culturally diverse, family-friendly meals you’ll make after long workdays, on a budget, without cooking experience. Plant-based doesn’t mean deprivation—it means flavor, abundance, and belonging.
Actionable Strategies — Meal planning that saves time and money. Shopping hacks for food deserts. Ways to reduce waste and lower your carbon footprint. Practical guidance you can implement today, not someday.
Expert Insight — Endorsed by Dr. Michael Klaper, M.D., and featuring contributions from physicians, farmers, and culinary experts who’ve spent decades understanding how health, food, and ecology intertwine.
This isn’t about perfection. It’s about curiosity, compassion, and willingness.
Whether you’re living with type 2 diabetes, struggling with your weight, raising healthy kids, or concerned about the planet—you’ll find both credible hope and practical guidance.
Every meal is a vote for the world you wish to inhabit.
Book proceeds support nonprofits removing plastic from our oceans and reforesting our planet.
Empowered Kitchen
Empowered Kitchen, compiled by physician and chef Dr. Colin Zhu, connects plant-forward cooking with personal health, community life, and care for the environment. Its contributors include doctors, dietitians, chefs, and farmers, whose perspectives give the book the feel of a shared project. Four opening “toolkits” address nutrition questions, kitchen habits, agriculture, and practical ways to reduce waste. The recipes then put those ideas on the table. Zhu’s introduction recalls watching his parents cook together, and that memory gives the book its center: food is a daily practice shaped by skill, culture, and the people who gather to eat it.
The guidance is most useful when it moves from a broad health goal to a decision a reader can make today. Contributors explain how to stock a pantry, plan meals around a busy schedule, use a freezer, adapt familiar dishes, and build flavor through heat, acid, herbs, and texture. Advice for feeding children, eating at work, and sharing meals at celebrations recognizes that habits have to fit real households. Chef Caryn Dugan captures the book’s encouraging approach: “Cooking is a practice, not a performance.” The chapters also give space to nutrient planning, including vitamin B12 for people eating entirely plant-based diets. Their question-and-answer format makes the material easy to revisit while shopping or deciding what to cook.
The recipe collection ranges from black bean stew and chickpea korma to roasted eggplant with lemon tahini, Haitian epis, red lentil wraps, and sweet potato brownies. Contributor notes often explain a dish’s family or cultural roots, while preparation times, substitutions, and storage tips help readers use the recipes beyond a single meal. Some dishes are quick enough for a weekday; others invite slower cooking and shared preparation. The range of voices brings welcome variety, though it also produces shifts in tone and in how confidently health benefits are described. The book is strongest when a recipe’s flavor, method, and possible variations carry the case for making it.
Its environmental chapters widen the view from the kitchen to soil, farm labor, food access, plastic use, forests, and oceans. Farmers discuss how growing practices affect the food supply, while other contributors suggest smaller household actions, such as using leftovers well or starting an herb garden. This breadth can make individual subjects brief, but it gives readers several points of entry into the book’s central idea. Zhu writes, “Food is meant to be communal and shared.” Empowered Kitchen follows through on that belief by treating cooking as something learned from others and passed along. It’s a generous, practical collection for readers who want more plants on their plates and a closer connection to the people and places behind their food.
Pages: 256 | ASIN: B0HNW5GX2Q
Core Strength is Your Superpower
Tracy L. Markley’s Core Strength Is Your Superpower is an accessible guide to understanding the core’s role in posture, balance, and everyday movement. Drawing on her experience as a fitness trainer, Markley presents the body as an interconnected system whose central muscles help support movement throughout the spine and limbs. Her emphasis on ordinary activities gives the subject immediate relevance: standing from a chair, walking across a room, and maintaining an upright position all become opportunities to consider how the body works. The book’s strongest quality is its ability to make a familiar fitness term feel specific and useful. It gives readers a clear reason to care about the muscles they’re being encouraged to strengthen.
Markley writes in a direct, conversational style, frequently addressing the reader and returning to images that make physical relationships easier to picture. Early in the book, she describes the core with a simple comparison: “It is like the trunk of a tree.” That image supplies an effective foundation for her discussion of support and stability. A second comparison involving stacked boxes reinforces her explanation of posture, giving readers another way to visualize alignment. Her treatment of spatial awareness and proprioception also connects technical vocabulary to recognizable experiences. Short chapters and recurring summaries make the material easy to revisit, although the repetition occasionally slows its progression. The overall voice remains encouraging, with a teacher’s attention to helping readers understand the purpose behind a movement.
Anatomical images give readers a visual reference for the muscles under discussion, while photographs of balance equipment connect the explanations to a training setting. Markley’s descriptions of working with older adults and stroke survivors bring a personal dimension to the material without overwhelming its educational focus. These passages convey the care she brings to her work and her interest in helping people move with greater confidence. The practical section introduces ways to incorporate balance tools, with attention to posture, support, and individual ability. Her statement, “Exercise should not cause pain,” reflects the plain language that makes her instruction approachable. Dedicated pages for recording exercises, questions, and progress further encourage active engagement with the book.
As a fitness resource, Core Strength Is Your Superpower succeeds through its clear organization, visual support, and sustained attention to functional movement. Its explanations are sometimes sweeping, and more detailed sourcing would strengthen the discussion of complex relationships involving neurological function, rehabilitation, and body weight. The client accounts are most persuasive as illustrations of Markley’s coaching experience, and her enthusiasm gives the book much of its character. Readers interested in posture, balance, and the mechanics of daily activity will find a compact, readable starting point, especially if they appreciate learning through comparisons and pictures. Markley makes the subject approachable while inviting readers to pay closer attention to their own movement. The result is a purposeful guide whose appeal rests on connecting knowledge of the body with activities people perform every day.
Pages: 100 | ASIN: B0HKJZ2H7X
Searching for Full: How GLP-1s Changed My Eating Disordered Life
Paige Gordon’s Searching for Full examines the reach of bulimia across decades of relationships, work, family life, and medical treatment. Beginning with a residential program she enters at thirty-one, Gordon then traces the childhood neglect, physical illness, and persistent hunger that preceded her eating disorder. The opening establishes the frustration that drives the book: seeking help while struggling to communicate what’s happening inside her body. Across thirty chapters, she builds a detailed account of the effort required to maintain an outwardly successful life while bingeing and purging in private. The memoir’s central achievement is making that hidden effort visible, including its effects on decisions that initially seem far removed from food.
Gordon gives considerable space to her romantic history, showing how fear of abandonment and the logistics of secrecy become entangled. Her long connection with Antonio carries particular weight because affection and trust coexist with the limits she places on intimacy. Later accounts of coercion and domestic violence show how thoroughly she’s learned to question her own perceptions. She also examines the harm she causes through deception, infidelity, and attempts to manage other people’s responses. These admissions give the narrative credibility and emotional complexity. Her inherited wealth adds another significant dimension: it supports education, repeated moves, property purchases, and surrogacy, even as she experiences it as a source of shame. The book gains depth from her recognition that financial security and emotional deprivation can occupy the same life.
The prose is conversational, sarcastic, and densely figurative, with reconstructed dialogue and sharply observed domestic details giving scenes their texture. Gordon’s training in interior design informs her descriptions of homes, which become expressions of hope, control, and retreat. Her humor is especially effective when it exposes the discrepancy between professional competence and private illness: “I never missed a deadline. I never missed a purge.” That compressed pairing conveys more than several longer explanations. Elsewhere, recurring metaphors of performance, broken structures, and financial transactions, followed by extensive self-analysis, can slow the narrative and restate insights the scenes have already established. Her acknowledgment that memories have been reconstructed and timelines adjusted provides useful context for the book’s highly shaped storytelling.
The final chapters describe the relief Gordon attributes to semaglutide and the emotional possibilities that follow. “Recovery gave me the courage, not the other way around,” she writes, identifying the change that allows her to disclose her illness fully to her partner. Her account of quieter meals, greater patience with her children, and reduced vigilance makes recovery concrete. The narrative then opens into correspondence with researchers, investigation of a rare receptor variant, and her decision to fund scientific work. The foreword supplies a measured discussion of the evidence and questions surrounding GLP-1 medications and eating disorders, while Gordon records the uncertainty surrounding her genetic findings. This developing inquiry gives the ending purpose. Searching for Full offers an absorbing account of how bodily distress, shame, and belonging shape one another, and how personal relief can grow into a sustained demand for better understanding.
Pages: 256 | ASIN: B0H58HNHJV
Chronic Pain: The Voyage Through the Maze
Damian Hayes’s Chronic Pain is part personal account, part practical handbook, and part companion for people trying to build a life around pain that refuses to behave predictably. Drawing on more than two decades of experience, Hayes takes readers through treatment options, sleep problems, relationships, work, diet, exercise, emotional strain, and the countless small adjustments that become part of everyday life with chronic pain. What gives the book its character is the way medical research sits alongside moments from Hayes’s own life, sometimes serious, sometimes funny, and often recorded in the middle of another difficult night. The result feels less like being lectured and more like sitting beside someone who has spent years exploring the maze and is willing to share what he has learned.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is its practicality. Hayes examines conventional and complementary treatments, but he also spends considerable time on the ordinary things that can make an exhausting day more manageable: pacing activities, finding somewhere comfortable to sleep, taking a hot shower, walking, listening to music, keeping a journal, eating something comforting, watching a familiar movie, asking for help, or simply changing what you’re doing when pain begins to take over. His Micro, Meso, and Macro framework gives readers a particularly useful way to think about these strategies, matching different responses to different levels of pain. There’s a refreshing willingness throughout the book to value small victories. A few hours of sleep, a pleasant meal, an invitation accepted, a moment of distraction, or an activity adapted rather than abandoned can become meaningful achievements.
The more personal sections give the book its emotional depth. Hayes writes openly about sleeplessness, frustration, work, family, isolation, anger, embarrassment, dark thoughts, and the strange negotiations that chronic pain forces into relationships. He also brings considerable humor to the subject, especially through Des and Hope, the characters he creates to represent Despair and Hopelessness. By giving his tormentors names, he creates psychological distance between himself and the pain, then introduces Sunshine and Starshine as counterweights. That imaginative streak reaches its fullest expression in the “Voyage of Self-Discovery,” where Hayes mentally plays rounds of golf and lets each hole unlock memories, stories, lessons, regrets, and moments of gratitude. It’s an unusual idea, but within the larger book it makes perfect sense: attention, imagination, memory, connection, and storytelling all become tools for reclaiming territory that pain has occupied.
What stays with you after finishing Chronic Pain is Hayes’s insistence on participation in life. His approach is grounded in experimentation, self-awareness, relationships, professional medical support, and the willingness to keep adjusting when circumstances change. By the closing chapters, the maze of the title has become more than a description of chronic pain. It represents the continual search for routes through difficult days, along with the recognition that a worthwhile life can still contain friendship, humor, usefulness, curiosity, adventure, and joy. Hayes asks readers to pay attention to what still belongs to them and to keep using it, one decision and one day at a time. A warm, inventive and deeply lived guide to reclaiming a life that chronic pain keeps trying to shrink.
Pages: 145 | ASIN : B0H68JK49C
The End of Autoimmunity: Cutting-Edge Tactics for Energy, Vitality, and Longevity
Leland Stillman’s The End of Autoimmunity is a patient-centered health guide built around the concept of “repair deficit,” the gap between the damage the body accumulates and its capacity to recover. Stillman presents autoimmune illness as the result of interacting nutritional imbalances, toxins, stressors, and infections. His clinical process, summarized as Nourish, Detoxify, and Purify, supports a broader framework encompassing principles, daily essentials, environmental hazards, diagnostics, and therapeutics. The book’s central perspective is captured succinctly in Stillman’s observation: “The problem is that the damage exceeds your capacity to repair it” (p. 36).
The book’s organization is one of its strongest features. It progresses from foundational habits such as breathing, hydration, sunlight, diet, sleep, and moderate exercise to laboratory testing, supplements, hormone therapy, and repurposed medications. Recurring concepts such as the “Therapeutic Tree” and the Good, Better, Best hierarchy help readers distinguish accessible starting points from interventions requiring greater expense or medical supervision. Surveys, reset plans, detox recommendations, and companion resources give the book the practical character of a clinical handbook.
Stillman writes in direct, approachable prose and grounds his framework in numerous patient stories involving multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, Crohn’s disease, thyroid disorders, chronic fatigue, and other conditions. These narratives give emotional and practical context to the laboratory values and treatment protocols. They also reinforce his emphasis on examining underlying processes across diagnostic categories: “The diagnosis tells you what to call your condition. It doesn’t tell you why you have it” (p. 118). His recurring metaphors involving bank accounts, trees, foundations, and accumulated trash make complex physiological ideas easier to follow, though their frequent repetition sometimes slows the book’s pace.
I think the book is most persuasive as an account of Stillman’s clinical philosophy and the patterns he believes he has observed in practice. Its references offer useful paths into the scientific literature, while much of its case for specific treatments depends on individual outcomes, self-reported improvement, and Stillman’s interpretation of specialized testing. Claims involving aluminum, electromagnetic exposure, vaccines, detoxification, and hair mineral analysis deserve especially careful evaluation alongside broader medical evidence. Read with that discernment, The End of Autoimmunity is a coherent, energetic, and highly actionable presentation of an integrative approach to chronic illness, best suited to readers prepared to discuss its recommendations with a qualified healthcare professional.
Pages: 190 | ISBN : 978-1544552507
Sharing My Story
In Turning Fertile, you share your difficult journey through infertility and medical complications as you learned to listen to your body and ultimately became a mother. What made you decide to tell your infertility journey as a memoir?
I chose to write Turning Fertile as a memoir because infertility often happens in silence. During my own journey, I searched for stories that felt honest, vulnerable, and unfiltered — stories that didn’t just describe medical procedures, but the emotional weight behind them. I couldn’t find many.
I realized that if I wanted a book that spoke to the loneliness, the fear, the hope, and the small victories that shape this experience, I would have to write it myself.
Sharing my story became a way to reclaim my voice after years of feeling like my body was being spoken for by test results, scans, and protocols. I wanted women to see themselves in a narrative that doesn’t shy away from the difficult parts, but still finds strength and meaning in them.
How did you decide how much of the medical experience to share?
I included the medical details that shaped my emotional reality — not every number or chart, but the moments that changed how I understood my body.
Repeated IUIs, the unexpected IVF cycle, ovarian hyperstimulation, surgery, and the tubal pregnancy were not just medical events; they were turning points in my life. Each one carried fear, confusion, and hope, and leaving them out would have made the story incomplete.
My goal was to strike a balance: enough detail for readers to understand the physical intensity of infertility treatments, but not so much that the memoir felt like a medical textbook. I wanted readers to feel what I felt — the waiting rooms, the injections, the ultrasounds — without overwhelming them.
Who did you imagine speaking to in the “Dear Reader” passages?
Whenever I wrote “Dear Reader,” I imagined someone sitting across from me who was going through the same emotional storm — someone exhausted, scared, hopeful, and unsure of what tomorrow might bring.
I pictured a woman who had just received a difficult test result, or who was silently grieving a failed cycle, or who was trying to stay strong for her partner while feeling fragile inside.
Those passages were my way of reaching out and saying: You are not alone. I see you. I’ve been where you are.
They became the emotional heartbeat of the book — a conversation between two people who may never meet, but share a deeply human experience.
What do you hope partners, family members, and friends will learn from your experiences?
I hope they learn that infertility is not just a medical condition — it is an emotional landscape that affects every part of a person’s life.
Partners may see the procedures and medications, but they don’t always see the quiet moments of grief, the self‑doubt, or the fear of disappointing the people they love. Family members and friends may offer advice or encouragement, but sometimes what people need most is simply understanding and patience.
I hope my story helps loved ones recognize that support is not about fixing anything — it’s about showing up, listening without judgment, and respecting the emotional complexity of the journey.
If this memoir teaches anything, I hope it teaches compassion.
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Amazon
Sonali carried hers like a locked diary. Then, one ordinary morning, her seven-year-old son lifted a violin to his chin, drew a single trembling note into the air — and something she had kept closed for years finally cracked open.
Turning Fertile is the story of the woman behind that note.
A girl whose ambition burned so brightly she stopped hearing her own body. A diagnosis that named years of quiet signs she’d ignored. And then the long, unmapped country of waiting — where time is no longer measured in days, but in heartbeats, held breaths, and prayers whispered in bathroom silence.
This is a book about hope that refuses to die. About the question every woman has asked in the quiet of a waiting room — why not me? — and the slow, hard-won discovery that the question itself is a form of love.
Written as an intimate conversation — Dear Reader, yes, you — it reaches straight to the woman sitting somewhere right now with her own version of that silence, and tells her the one thing she most needs to hear.
This book will not be gentle with the truth. But it will be gentle with you.
Turning Fertile: The hardest roads lead to the most extraordinary arrivals
Sonali Sheetal Appikonda’s Turning Fertile is an intimate memoir about infertility, marriage, and learning to listen to a body she once treated as an obstacle to ambition. The story begins with her seven-year-old son performing at a violin recital, then circles back to her teenage years, when irregular cycles, facial hair, PCOS, and thyroid problems first entered her life. From there, Appikonda traces a demanding path through repeated IUIs, an unplanned IVF cycle, ovarian hyperstimulation, surgery, an excruciating tubal pregnancy, and finally the birth of her son. Framing the memoir with the recital gives the journey a satisfying shape: the child onstage is both the ending readers already know and the reason the story can finally be told.
What makes the book memorable is its attention to the ordinary details surrounding medical ordeals. A pharmacist understands a failed attempt when the husband returns for sanitary pads. A nurse protects Appikonda’s privacy after an uncomfortable scan. A handmade picture bought on a cold evening becomes a symbol of the life she and her husband nearly forgot to enjoy. Her husband is especially important to the book, not as a faultless rescuer but as the person who cooks after surgery, sits through appointments, carries hope when she can’t, and grieves privately when he thinks no one is watching. Their marriage gives the memoir its emotional center, while the costs, invasive procedures, workplace pressures, and family questions show how thoroughly infertility can occupy a couple’s life.
Appikonda writes as though she’s speaking across a table to someone living through a similar experience. The recurring “Dear Reader” passages make that intention explicit, blending memoir with reassurance and plain-language explanations of fertility treatments. Concrete numbers, including twenty-one retrieved eggs, twelve IUI cycles, and four brief days of pregnancy, keep the physical and emotional stakes from becoming abstract. Her repeated images of doors, waiting rooms, seasons, stitches, and bodily “messages” give the book a meditative quality. Some phrases and reflections recur often enough to slow the narrative, and the medical explanations occasionally interrupt a tense scene, but that repetition also mimics the exhausting cycle of hoping, waiting, and beginning again. The glossary at the end reinforces the book’s role as a companion as much as a personal history.
The readers most likely to appreciate Turning Fertile are people navigating infertility, PCOS, assisted reproduction, pregnancy loss, or the strain these experiences can place on a relationship. Their partners and close family members may find it equally valuable because the book shows forms of grief and support that patients don’t always voice. It will also speak to readers drawn to candid accounts of Indian family life, career ambition, migration, medicine, and marriage. Appikonda’s successful pregnancy gives her story its conclusion, but the book’s deeper subject is the life that continues during the waiting: work, love, travel, disappointment, and the gradual recovery of a self larger than any diagnosis.
Pages: 142 | ASIN : B0HFCD2YSW
