My Healthy Lifestyle Guide by Caroline Deisler is the second book I’ve tackled from The Vegan Bundle. This book was visually gorgeous. The designs and layouts were done really well. I also didn’t find hardly any typos or needed edits like I did in the first ebook I read from The Vegan Bundle, aside from feeling like it was missing clearly divided sections which is super minor. That’s pretty much were my positivity for this book ends.
I try to come into all of these books with an open mind, but by page 6 I was already convinced this was being written by someone with a very disordered mindset. On page 6 specifically there’s a picture of our author in which she explains she had “gained a lot of weight” and my mind was just blown because she looks very thin in the picture. The book is littered with talk of “loosing fat” and “fat loss” with emphasis on staying lean as if that’s the end all, be all of life. The book includes detox language and oil fear mongering. Her sample weekly meal plan is completely out of touch for the average person, featuring multiple fruit mono-meals a day. Also un-relatable is her suggestion that every meal be enjoyed slowly, cryotherapy, and her regular use of colonics (which probably isn’t very safe either).
One thing in particular I noticed throughout the book was her mentioning that snacking on dates helps to curb your sweet cravings. It was mentioned enough times that it made me think maybe sweets is a major issue for her personally. In her meal plan she suggests snacking on 10-15 dates, which to me, admittedly not the biggest sweets person, sounds like an impossible task and kind of gross.
Caroline shares a few recipes featured towards the end of the book. The smoothies and basic salads seem like they would be tasty enough but they aren’t ground breaking combinations of food by any means. She doesn’t provide any dressing or toppings options for the salads and baked potatoes that she swears by, not even a little pinch of salt. As you move into what seem more like dinner recipes the creativity is definitely punched up and these seem like some pretty yummy recipes I would want to try, but once again there’s no talk of seasoning. The only recipe that really had me shook was the date and banana smoothie. That sounds like a sugar bomb and I feel a bit nauseous just thinking about what that must taste like.
I hadn’t heard of Caroline prior to reading this book so maybe my intuition is completely wrong on the impression I got from this book. It’s an aesthetically pleasing book, but I hope no one with an already disordered approach to eating takes to this advice. On Caroline’s website this ebook sells for 35€ and I can’t see how its worth that amount of money. I think her heart is in the right place and you can tell from her writing voice she wants to genuinely help people but I feel some of this could be problematic. Unfortunately, I cant recommend this book for anyone but I hope Caroline is in a healthier place than she was than she wrote this ebook.
