Book picks similar to
Changing Normal: How I Helped My Husband Beat Cancer by Marilu Henner
non-fiction
nonfiction
health
memoir
Eat Pretty: Nutrition for Beauty, Inside and Out
Jolene Hart - 2014
Beauty-full reading to last a lifetime." —Ann Louise Gittleman, Ph.D., CNS, and New York Times bestselling author Look and feel your best all year long with this seasonal nutrition guide: Nutrition is the fastest-rising beauty trend around the world. Eat Pretty simplifies the latest science and presents a user-friendly program for gorgeous looks, at any age, that last a lifetime. Buzzwords like antioxidants, biotin, and omega-3s are explained alongside more than 85 everyday foods, each paired with their specific beauty-boosting benefit: walnuts for supple skin, nutmeg for beauty sleep, and radishes for strong nails. But healthful ingredients are just one aspect of beauty nutrition. Eat Pretty offers a full lifestyle makeover, exploring stress management, hormonal balance, and mindful living.Featuring over 85 glow-getting food including celery for skin hydration, raspberries for luscious hair, dandelion greens for detox, ginger to antiaging defense, and many more.Includes charts, lists, and nearly 20 recipes that make this nutrition book a delicious and infinitely useful package—in the kitchen, at the grocer, and on the go.Eat Pretty is a lifestyle guide that helps you identify the foods, habits, and thoughts that are standing in your way of discovering your true radiant beauty.Makes a wonderful birthday, graduation or "just because" gift for any beautiful person in your life.Includes beautifully illustrated pages and recipes for nutritious inspiration.Author Jolene Hart is a beauty and health coach certified by the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and the American Association of Drugless Practitioners. Her work has appeared in InStyle, People, Allure, and Organic Spa.
Flying on the Inside: A Memoir of Trauma and Recovery
Rachel Gotto - 2021
Newly widowed and faced with a deadly brain tumour, she was given two years to live. She wanted more…When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change.A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be ‘managed’, and Rachel had, at best, two years to live.Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive. She had already lost far too much. She had already watched her brother succumb, at only twenty-eight, to cancer. She had already lost her beloved husband in a terrible scuba diving accident when she was six months pregnant. So she did the only thing she knew how to do. She fought for her life.This gripping and inspiring memoir about overcoming tragedy and trauma charts one tenacious woman’s incredible fight to find light in the darkest of journeys. It is a life-affirming tale of positivity and hope in the face of the most difficult of human experiences.
Me and the Ugly C
Becky Dennington - 2011
Breast cancer. In an instant, her life changed all because of a single word she couldn’t even bring herself to say out loud. The ugly C word.Share in the journey of one young woman’s fight against breast cancer, the sacrifices a family makes, the heartbreak cancer leaves in its path, and the joy found along the way.
Everybody's Got Something
Robin Roberts - 2014
Or you already have or you will. As momma always said, "Everybody's got something." So begins beloved Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts's new memoir in which she recounts the incredible journey that's been her life so far, and the lessons she's learned along the way. With grace, heart, and humor, she writes about overcoming breast cancer only to learn five years later that she will need a bone marrow transplant to combat a rare blood disorder, the grief and heartbreak she suffered when her mother passed away, her triumphant return to GMA after her medical leave, and the tremendous support and love of her family and friends that saw her through her difficult times. Following her mother's advice to "make your mess your message," Robin taught a nation of viewers that while it is true that we've all got something -- a medical crisis to face, aging parents to care for, heartbreak in all its many forms --- we've also all got something to give: hope, encouragement, a life-saving transplant or a spirit-saving embrace. As Robin has learned, and what readers of her remarkable story will come to believe as well, it's all about faith, family and friends. And finding out that you are stronger, much stronger, than you think.
The Age-Well Project: Easy Ways to a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life
Annabel Streets - 2019
But what should we change and how do we do it? Annabel Streets and Susan Saunders spent their 30s climbing the career ladder, having children and caring for elderly parents - all at the same time. By their 40s, they were exhausted, stressed, sleeping too little and rushing too much. They began to ask whether the prolonged ill health and dementia suffered by their parents was their inevitable future too - could they do anything to avoid requiring their own children to care for them in old age? Thus began THE AGE-WELL PROJECT. With incredible tenacity, Annabel and Susan read 50,000 scientific research papers on all aspects of ageing to find what advice cutting-edge research can offer us on how to ensure the longer lives we're living are healthy and happy. Putting their findings into practice, they found that the lifestyle changes they made were having incredible benefits on their health and wellbeing now - as well as for the future. Told with empathy and humour, in THE AGE-WELL PROJECT Annabel and Susan share the 50 key lessons they learned, the meals they cooked and the experts' tips they uncovered to make the second half of your life the best half of your life - happy, healthy and disease-free. Author BiographyAnnabel was a founder member of an award-winning marketing company, advising the chief executives of companies such as Sony, Reuters and the Financial Times. After four children, and at breaking point, she sold her company. Following a stint studying photography and producing a community cook book, she changed tack and wrote an award-winning novel The Joyce Girl which sold in 14 countries and was selected for the 2017 Berlin Film Festival. Since then she has written regularly for a range of titles including the Daily Telegraph, Psychologies, The Author, the Guardian, The Irish Times, Elle, Australian
That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour
Sunita Puri - 2019
Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine's impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life's temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine--a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care.Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.
Wednesday's Children: The Memoirs of a Nurse-Turned-Social-Worker in Rural Appalachia
Kathryn Anne Michaels - 2018
When a friend urges her to switch from nursing to paramedic medicine and child protection social work, Kate accepts the challenge and finds herself in an isolated rural area of the Appalachian Mountains.Here a new set of challenges await: technical cliff rescues and hikes into remote back-country “hollers” to remove child victims of sexual assault from their homes only to have an indifferent judge order them back the next day, and dealing with some of America’s poorest and most distrustful citizens.And from all appearances, and even though she’s white, former members of the Ku Klux Klan have just set her house on fire…Based on the memoirs of a registered nurse-turned-social worker, this is a tale of heartbreak and laughter, courage and cowardice seasoned with a candid look at the early days of social work and emergency rescue medicine that will both challenge and renew your faith in humanity.Warning: Some graphic content
The Patient in Room Nine Says He's God
Louis M. Profeta - 2008
The late-night passing of a beloved aunt summons a childhood bully who shows up minutes later, after twenty-five years, to be forgiven and to heal a broken doctor. This ER doctor finds God's opposite in: a battered child's bruises covered over by make-up, a dying patient whose son finally shows up at the end to reclaim the man's high-top sneakers, the rich or celebrity patients loaded with prescription drugs from doctor friends who end up addicted. But, his real outrage is directed at our cavalier treatment of the elderly, If you put a G-tube in your 80-year-old mother with Alzheimer's because she's no longer eating, you will probably have a fast track to hell.
Don't Cross Your Eyes...They'll Get Stuck That Way!: And 75 Other Health Myths Debunked
Aaron E. Carroll - 2011
Aaron E. Carroll and Rachel C. Vreeman explored a wide range of myths and misconceptions about our bodies and health in the media sensation, Don't Swallow Your Gum!, featured on The Dr. Oz Show, CNN, and in The New York Times, USA Today, and more.Now, they're delving into a whole new collection of myths based on the latest scientific research, including:- Eggs give you high cholesterol.- You should stretch before you exercise.- Kids in day care catch more colds.- Sit-ups or crunches will flatten your stomach.- A glass of warm milk will put you to sleep.With a perfect balance of authoritative research and breezy humor, Don't Cross Your Eyes . . . They'll Get Stuck That Way! exposes the truth behind all of the things you thought you knew about your health, your well-being, and how the body works.
Half a Life: A Memoir
Jill Ciment - 1996
In 1964 the Ciment family left middle-class Montreal for the fringe desert communities of Los Angeles, where their always unstable father lost the last vestiges of his sanity. Terrified and broke, in a world he could neither understand nor control, he came apart. When the family finally threw him out, he lived for weeks in his car at the foot of their driveway.Ciment turned herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary-a tough girl who survived any way she could. She and her brother Jack helped support the family by working for a shady market researcher, quickly learning to supply their own answers to burning questions like, "Did we like Swanson TV dinners? If so, why? On a scale of one to ten, how would we rate the new Talking Barbie? Arrow wax? Dr. Ross's dog food?" She became a gang girl, a professional forger, and a Times Square porn model. Using a friend's SAT score she cheated her way into art school, and seduced and eventually married her art teacher, a married man thirty years her senior. By turns comic, tragic, and heartrending, Half a Life is a bold, unsentimental portrait of the artist as a girl from nowhere, making herself up from scratch, acting up, and finally overcoming the consequences of being the child of a father incapable of love and responsibility.
The Women’s Doc
Caroline de Costa - 2021
She and her husband packed their bags and their children, and headed for Dublin.When Caroline first started in medicine, being an unmarried mother was frowned on, cane toads were used for pregnancy tests, and giving birth was much riskier than it is today. Her funny and poignant stories of bringing babies into the world show that, while much has changed, women still work hard and it remains a bloody business. A birth plan is no guarantee of a normal birth (whatever that is). Men have always wanted to control women's bodies, and Caroline has been instrumental in giving Australian women of all backgrounds the opportunity to resist, and to choose when and how they have babies. Her behind-the-scenes stories reveal it's often the little things that win a campaign. 'An enthralling and at times eye-popping ride through her brilliant career as an obstetrician and fierce advocate for women's reproductive freedom.' - Anne Summers'Caroline de Costa has lived an exciting and unusual life, is a brilliant doctor, a fierce and trailblazing feminist and now reveals herself as a gripping and evocative writer!' - Jane Caro
The Road to Happiness is Always Under Construction
Linda Gray - 2015
She’s been through more pain and tragedy than her longtime fans realize, having suffered paralyzing polio as a child, growing up with an alcoholic mother, landing in a emotionally abusive marriage at twenty-two and living by her husband’s rules for sixteen years before she openly rebelled against him to take an acting class. At thirty-eight, Linda got her big break, as Larry Hagman’s wife on Dallas. With fame came a bitter, public divorce, trouble at home with her two kids, and the loss of her beloved sister to breast cancer. Linda got through it all—the challenges of sexism in Hollywood and the pressures of being a single working mom—with a relentlessly positive attitude that kept her cruising, with a few speed bumps, to the place of serenity she thrives in now.To celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday, Linda is opening up about her life for the first time. Inside this book, she tells deeply personal stories with wit, humor, and candor, and reveals how she’s learned to love every day as the blessing it is and to treat herself with the kindness she bestows on friends and strangers alike. Along with wisdom, Linda has accumulated a lot of practical tips about maintaining a healthy lifestyle—how to strengthen and detoxify your body, liberate your mind, and uplift your soul—and shares them as well. Her message to “give, love, and shine, baby, shine” will fill anyone with inspiration to live life to the fullest, and never stop pursuing honesty and joy.
Camp Nurse: My Adventures at Summer Camp
Tilda Shalof - 2009
It’s an experience we remember vividly; a time of food fights and cabin raids, first kisses and bittersweet heartbreaks, endless days of sun and fun away from parents. But there’s one person who has a take on camp unlike anyone else: the camp nurse.Camp Nurse reveals what it’s like to be the person kids turn to for help, comfort, and advice. Throughout nurse Tilda Shalof’s six summers at camp, kids troop through the infirmary with a variety of ordinary—as well as some extraordinary—complaints, questions, and ailments, including the symptom endemic to every summer camp: homesickness. Along the way she discovers it’s often the emotional boo-boos that need more attention than the bug bites, poison ivy, and scrapes and scratches that come with the territory.Camp Nurse is funny, entertaining, insightful, and above all heartwarming. It’s filled with all the twinges of nostalgia one expects to get when remembering long-ago summers at camp.Praise for Tilda Shalof’s other books:
“A cracking good read.”
– Quill & Quire
“The best-seller no one can put down.”
– Montreal Gazette
The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Astonishing Dialogue Taking Place in Our Bodies Impacts Health, Weight, and Mood
Emeran Mayer - 2015
While the dialogue between the gut and the brain has been recognized by ancient healing traditions, including Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, Western medicine has failed to appreciate the complexity of how the brain, gut, and more recently, the microbiome—the microorganisms that live inside us—communicate with one another. In The Mind-Gut Connection, Dr. Emeran Mayer, executive director of the UCLA Center for Neurobiology of Stress, offers a revolutionary look at this developing science, teaching us how to harness the power of the mind-gut connection to take charge of our health.The Mind-Gut Connection shows how to keep the brain-gut communication clear and balanced to:• heal the gut by focusing on a plant-based diet• balance the microbiome by consuming fermented foods and probiotics, fasting, and cutting out sugar and processed foods• promote weight loss by detoxifying and creating healthy digestion and maximum nutrient absorption• boost immunity and prevent the onset of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s andAlzheimer’s• generate a happier mindset and reduce fatigue, moodiness, anxiety, and depression• prevent and heal GI disorders such as leaky gut syndrome, food sensitivities and allergies, and IBS, as well as digestive discomfort such as heartburn and bloating• and much more.
Ghost Boy: My Miraculous Escape from a Life Locked Inside My Own Body
Martin Pistorius - 2011
But he was alive and trapped inside his own body for ten years.In January 1988 Martin Pistorius, aged twelve, fell inexplicably sick. First he lost his voice and stopped eating. Then he slept constantly and shunned human contact. Doctors were mystified. Within eighteen months he was mute and wheelchair-bound. Martin's parents were told an unknown degenerative disease left him with the mind of a baby and less than two years to live.Martin was moved to care centers for severely disabled children. The stress and heartache shook his parents’ marriage and their family to the core. Their boy was gone. Or so they thought.Ghost Boy is the heart-wrenching story of one boy’s return to life through the power of love and faith. In these pages, readers see a parent’s resilience, the consequences of misdiagnosis, abuse at the hands of cruel caretakers, and the unthinkable duration of Martin’s mental alertness betrayed by his lifeless body.We also see a life reclaimed—a business created, a new love kindled—all from a wheelchair. Martin's emergence from his own darkness invites us to celebrate our own lives and fight for a better life for others.