With summer in full swing and lazy days full of porch swings and beach chairs ahead, WEforum would like to share a few reads that top our summer list for 2021. From nutrition to self-healing, along with a little bit of history and introspection, we hope these titles will inspire, heal and bring out the best you that you can be. So take a moment to sit back, relax, put your feet up and work on you this summer. Just don’t forget a tall glass of something cold to sip on while you dive in.
1. The Future of Nutrition: An Insider’s Look at the Science, Why We Keep Getting It Wrong, and How to Start Getting It Right
By Nelson Disla and T. Colin Campbell
From the coauthor of The China Study and author of the New York Times bestselling follow-up, Whole.
Despite extensive research and overwhelming public information on nutrition and health science, we are more confused than ever–about the foods we eat, what good nutrition looks like, and what it can do for our health.
In The Future of Nutrition, T. Colin Campbell cuts through the noise with an in-depth analysis of our historical relationship to the food we eat, the source of our present information overload, and what our current path means for the future–both for individual health and society as a whole.
In these pages, Campbell takes on the institution of nutrition itself, unpacking:
- Why the institutional emphasis on individual nutrients (instead of whole foods) as a means to explain nutrition has had catastrophic consequences
- How our reverence for high quality animal protein has distorted our understanding of cholesterol, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, environmental carcinogens, and more
- Why mainstream food and nutrient recommendations and public policy favor corporate interests over that of personal and planetary health
- How we can ensure that public nutrition literacy can prevent and treat personal illness more effectively and economically
The Future of Nutrition offers a fascinating deep-dive behind the curtain of the field of nutrition–with implications both for our health and for the practice of science itself.
2. How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, + Create Your Self
Dr. Nicole LePera
As a clinical psychologist, Dr. Nicole LePera often found herself frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy. Wanting more for her patients—and for herself—she began a journey to develop a united philosophy of mental, physical and spiritual wellness that equips people with the interdisciplinary tools necessary to heal themselves. After experiencing the life-changing results herself, she began to share what she’d learned with others—and soon “The Holistic Psychologist” was born.
Now, Dr. LePera is ready to share her much-requested protocol with the world. In How to Do the Work, she offers both a manifesto for SelfHealing as well as an essential guide to creating a more vibrant, authentic, and joyful life. Drawing on the latest research from a diversity of scientific fields and healing modalities, Dr. LePera helps us recognize how adverse experiences and trauma in childhood live with us, resulting in whole body dysfunction—activating harmful stress responses that keep us stuck engaging in patterns of codependency, emotional immaturity, and trauma bonds. Unless addressed, these self-sabotaging behaviors can quickly become cyclical, leaving people feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, and unwell.
In How to Do the Work, Dr. LePera offers readers the support and tools that will allow them to break free from destructive behaviors to reclaim and recreate their lives. Nothing short of a paradigm shift, this is a celebration of empowerment that will forever change the way we approach mental wellness and self-care.
3. The Pegan Diet: 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World
By Mark Hyman, MD
What do you get when you combine the best of paleo with the best of vegan? Pegan! For decades, the diet wars have pitted advocates for the low-carb, high-fat paleo diet against advocates of the exclusively plant-based vegan diet and dozens of other diets leaving most of us bewildered and confused. For those of us on the sidelines, trying to figure out which approach is best has been nearly impossible—both extreme diets have unique benefits and drawbacks. But how can it be, we’ve asked desperately, that our only options are bacon and butter three times a day or endless kale salads? How do we eat to reverse disease and optimize health, longevity, and performance? How do we eat to reverse climate change? There must be a better way!
Fortunately, there is. With The Pegan Diet‘s food-is-medicine approach, Mark Hyman explains how to:
- Combine the best aspects of the paleo diet (good fats, limited refined carbs, limited sugar) with the vegan diet (lots and lots of fresh, healthy veggies)
- Create a delicious diet that is not only good for your brain and your body, but also good for the planet.
- Take your cooking up to the next level, with 30 mouthwatering recipes such as Avocado Latke “Toast,” Chai Pancakes with Coconut Whipped Cream, Spicy Grain-Free Steak Tacos with Tapenade, Fall-off-the-Bone Short Ribs with Cashew “Couscous,” and Snickerdoodle Doughnuts
Packed with practical tips and advice, The Pegan Diet offers a balanced and easy-to-follow approach to eating that will help you get, and stay, fit, healthy, focused, and happy—for life.
4. The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
By Vishen Lakhiani
Forget hustling. This book will disrupt your deeply held beliefs about work, success, and, indeed, life.
If you’re the average person in the developed world, you spend 70 percent of your waking hours at work. And if you’re the average person, you’re miserable for most of those hours. This is simply not an acceptable state of affairs for your one shot at life. No matter your station, you possess incredible unique powers. It’s a modern myth that hard work and hustle are the paths to success. Inside you is a soul. And once you unleash it fully into the domain of work, magic happens. Awakening the Buddha and the Badass inside you is a process that will disrupt the way you work altogether. You’ll gain access to tools that bend the very rules of reality.
- The Buddha is the archetype of the spiritual master. The person who can live in this world but also move with an ease, grace, and flow that comes from inner awareness and alignment.
- The Badass is the archetype of the changemaker. This is the person who is out there creating change, building, coding, writing, inventing, leading. The badass represents the benevolent disruptor–the person challenging the norms so we can be better as a species.
Once you integrate the skill sets of both archetypes, you will experience life at a different level from most people. You will operate from a space of bliss, ease, inspiration, and abundance. The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work will show you how.
Author of the New York Times bestseller The Code of the Extraordinary Mind and founder of Mindvalley, Vishen Lakhiani has turned his own life and company into his research lab. He’s codified everything he’s learned into the how-to steps in this book.
The Buddha and the Badass teaches you how to master your work and your life.
5. The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
By Janice P. Nimura
The vivid biography of two pioneering sisters who, together, became America’s first female doctors and transformed New York’s medical establishment by creating a
hospital by and for women. Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for greatness beyond the scope of “ordinary” womanhood. Though the world recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity won her the acceptance of the all-male medical establishment and in 1849 she became the first woman in America to receive a medical degree. But Elizabeth’s story is incomplete without her often forgotten sister, Emily, the third woman in America to receive a medical degree. Exploring the sisters’ allies, enemies and enduring partnership, Nimura presents a story of both trial and triumph: Together the sisters founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary; they were also judgmental, uncompromising, and occasionally misogynistic–their convictions as 19th-century women often contradicted their ambitions. From Bristol, England, to the new cities of antebellum America, this work of rich history follows the sister doctors as they transform the nineteenth century medical establishment and, in turn, our contemporary one.
All book descriptions/summaries are provided by the publishers
