The Health Habit Book Review

I’ve been following Elizabeth Rider for several years now, and especially love her Elizabeth Eats series on FMTV. Presented with the opportunity to read her book before it’s released, I jumped at the chance, as I was sure I will love it and learn so much, which is exactly what happened.

The Health Habit: 7 Easy Steps to Reach Your Goals & Dramatically Improve Your Life is exactly as the title suggests, a guide to building healthy habits into your life, where eating in a healthy way becomes automatic and living your best most energetic life is easy and fun.

The book is for those that shy away from strict dieting rules, and are eager to find the freedom to enjoy eating while still living a healthy lifestyle. Because it is focused on building healthy habits, it takes a long-term approach with no quick-fix solutions that don’t help anyone (except the dieting industry) in the long-run.

Here are my biggest take-aways:

Eating the Qualitarian Way – which means not necessarily following any specific dietary plan, but always evaluating the quality of food before consuming it by asking questions like where did this food come from? Are the ingredients naturally sourced? And is the food high-quality?
We all have your own “glycemic index” – Elizabeth explains how individuals’ blood sugar levels react to certain foods and combinations of food very differently. I never knew that! She gives an example of how a friend would eat a big handful of cherries on their own and her blood sugar would be at 175 when tested 30 minutes later. When Elizabeth did the same thing her blood sugar was at 132, which is within the normal range. Definitely getting myself a blood glucose monitor to find out how I react to different foods!
Healthy habits = Freedom – Being healthy and establishing healthy habits should give you more freedom. It should feel expansive, not restrictive.
Moderator vs. Abstainer – it’s important to know what your eating style is…or more accurately your personality type, in order to help determine the best and most likely to succeed approach to eating you should adopt. Elizabeth borrows this concept from one of my favorite authors, Gretchen Rubin. You’re a moderator if having an occasional indulgence makes it more likely that you will stick to your healthy eating plan and don’t like restriction or strict dietary guidelines. You’re an abstainer if you have trouble stopping something if you get started (bag of chips, a tub of ice cream?) and are not tempted by things that you’ve decided are off-limits.

The book also explains the benefits of intermittent fasting, and I like how Elizabeth gave 3 options of fasting to eating window; 16:8, 14:10 and 12:12, because everybody is different and circumstances change. For example, I stick to a 14:10 fasting to eating window on weekdays, with one or two days of a longer fast (Muslim sunset to sunrise fast) and a 12:12 schedule on the weekend. As with this example, the book gives so much flexibility to accommodate the advice to what suits you best. I love that!

There’s a 28-day Kick Start Plan included in the book, that is again quite flexible. It’s not restrictive at all but will give your body a break from the foods that put a strain on your system, such as processed white flour, sugar and dairy. It goes through the approved foods, and the ones to stay away from with sample meal plans. The book also includes 50 recipes that are beautifully photographed to follow whether you plan on following the kick start plan or not.

One of the best well-rounded healthy lifestyle books I’ve read in a long time. I can’t recommend it enough. The book is released August 20th and will be available in hard-cover, audio and kindle.