Embrace This Fresh Start
Diane and Doug Clement Make Healthy Living Delicious
Start Fresh!: Your Complete Guide to Midlifestyle Food and Fitness is full of health tips as well as dishes that foodies will flip over.
It’s never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle, whether it’s improving your diet, boosting your fitness level, or both. A great place to find practical advice is in Start Fresh!: Your Compete Guide to Midlifestyle Food and Fitness (Whitecap Books, CAN$29.95).
Written by husband-and-wife duo Doug and Diane Clement, Start Fresh! is clearly aimed at middle-aged men and women. But it appeals to a broader audience because, should we be so lucky, getting older happens to the best of us.
The authors are a power couple. He’s a sports-medicine clinician, a former Olympic athlete and coach, and former team doctor for the Vancouver Canucks. She’s also a former Olympic athlete, as well as a chef, best known for her Chef on the Run cookbook series and for starting Vancouver’s Tomato Fresh Food Café with her daughter. Put their experience together and you’ve got an abundance of fitness- and food-related knowledge.
The first, and smaller, section of the book focuses strictly on fitness, with entries on everything from stretching and body-mass index to the benefits of exercise on mood. It also includes easy-to-follow exercise regimes. The Clements don’t mince words when it comes to the common excuses people use to skip regular physical activity (lines like “I don’t have time”). “Have you heard of determination, persistence, originality, problem-solving, and a never-give-up attitude? Excuses are not solutions,” they write.
The rest of the book features recipes that health-conscious foodies will love. Some of them will be familiar to Clement fans, as a few are duplicates from her previous cookbooks.
There are Diane’s Energy Cookies, chock full of dried cherries and cranberries and toasted walnuts, pecans, and sunflower seeds. Her Carrot Tomato Soup is rich with wholesome flavours, and the Asian Noodle Salad is a sensational meal in itself.
Diane also shares her Low-Fat Caesar Dressing: Hooray! Made with skim milk, it’s especially tasty when tossed with grilled chicken. Her Mexican Artichoke Bites, made with mild green chilies and white-corn tortilla chips, are always a hit, as is her Artichoke Fritatta, which comes to life with green onions and sun-dried tomatoes.
Fresh Start! also features such elegant fare for entertaining, like Pork Tenderloin Superb and a classic Chicken Saltimbocca.
Adding to the recipes’ appeal are the stories Diane shares about each dish. Sometimes she explains where she discovered the item or how she’s transformed an original to something lower in fat; elsewhere she reminisces about her early days in the restaurant business or takes a trip down the memory lane of magical holidays. And of course she offers fantastic serving suggestions.
Fresh Start! is worth having for the recipes alone. But why stop at eating well when you can incorporate more exercise into your life too? With words of wisdom from these role models, living well is a true pleasure.
