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Find out moreLooking to change your life? Whether it’s physical, emotional or spiritual change you seek, these books may have some answers. If you’re seeking to enlighten, enlarge or explore your mind, check out our Mind & Body section for a more comprehensive range of books.
In The Four Pillar Plan, Dr Rangan Chatterjee presents an easily accessible plan for taking control of your health and your life. Everyday health revolves around Dr Chatterjee's four pillars: relaxation, food, sleep and movement. By making small, achievable changes in each of these key areas you can create and maintain good health - and avoid illness.
This book is the bravely honest story of a year in Clare's life. A year that started with her quitting booze and then being given the devastating diagnosis of breast cancer. By the end of the year she is booze-free and cancer-free, she no longer has a wine belly, is two stone lighter and with a life that is so much richer, healthier and more rewarding than ever before. She has a happier family and a more positive outlook. Sober Diaries is an upbeat, funny and positive look at how to live life to the full. Interwoven within Clare's own very personal and brilliantly comic story is research and advice as she discovers the answers to questions like: How do I know if I'm drinking too much? How will I cope at parties? What do I say to friends and family? How do I cope with cravings? If I stop drinking will I lose weight? What if my partner still drinks? And many more.
What a lovely, warm, kind and friendly book this is, Fearne Cotton writes about the state of calm, and how to find it in our modern, hectic lives. This isn’t just to read, it’s an interactive book too, encouraging you to make notes, to revisit thoughts and feelings. Fearne looks at everyday life, she also visits anxiety, trauma, and PTSD, she highlights breathing, living in the moment, and also introduces us to various friends and experts who have the ability to reach or teach a sense of calm. The book itself feels calm, the colours, font, and layout all help to soothe, to give you a hug as you read. While this could be read in order from beginning to end, I also feel you can dip in and out, take your time, visit when you have a moment. Calm is reassuring and revitalising, it’s the perfect helping hand for you to make some time for yourself, to reflect, and look for peace. ~ Liz Robinson
Are you fed up with restrictive dieting? Do you feel you've tried everything before and failed? Then this plan is for you. This is different. This will work.Joe Wicks is back with another instalment of 100 brand-new delicious recipes and five speedy, effective HIIT workouts. The Fat-Loss Plan can motivate everyone on their way to achieving a fit, lean and healthy body. Inside the book is a combination of reduced-carb, post-workout and snacks and sweet treat recipes - all incredibly tasty and easy to make in 15 minutes flat. Every recipe is filling and fuels you with energy for your day and your workout - including Steak Taco with Lime Salsa, Lamb Kofte Tagine and Veggie Super Bowl. Thanks to sample weekly plans, Joe makes it simple for you to prep like a boss and eat well every day of the week. Joe has more than 4 million followers on social media where fans share their personal journeys towards a leaner, fitter lifestyle. The Lean in 15 titles won platinum and gold awards at the Specsavers Nielsen book awards. Joe's first book Lean in 15: The Shift Plan has become the bestselling diet book of all time and all his books have been non-fiction number one bestsellers.Start your journey to better health and fitness now with The Body Coach.
Brings together scientific research, expert analysis and elite athlete contributions to reveal how relating to your mind, body and surroundgins in a new way can help you run longer and faster, as well as offer a boost to your overall mental, emotional and physical health.
Judging from the recipes this is mostly modern comfort cooking. The modern comfort eater can check the contents list for something that answers their particular craving, for something sweet or sharp, something crunchy or soft – a jolly good idea allowing the distracted cook to zone in fast on what they want. Heaven knows, there is enough bad news around now to sink anyone but there is some relief to be found in a warm and inviting kitchen cooking up John Whaite’s food designed to soothe and comfort. ~ Sue Baker Like for Like Reading How to be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking by Nigella Lawson Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavours by Diana Henry
A distillation of prescriptions given – and taken – on William Sieghart’s online Poetry Pharmacy. No harm to be got from these prescriptions, instead there is comfort, love, advice and experience aplenty. I was immediately taken by the poems of Hafiz, a C14 Persian poet, short sublime poems, had to google to find more so a poets index would have been useful. As anthologies such as this are useful springboards, short author biographies would too have been welcomed. Overall though, a calming collection of words for troubled souls and lovely to have a cloth bound book to treasure. ~ Sue Baker Like for Like Reading: Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times by Neil Astley The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin
A short self-help book to encourage anyone living a solo life to live it to the full. Author Christine Ingall says that being single or solo doesn’t mean being a second-class citizen. This book is to “help anyone who struggles with their solo life to live it… without excuses, and without fear of being seen to be alone”. The number of people living alone in mid-life, and people describing themselves as lonely has increased. The author offers a number of exercises, uses her own life as an example, and gives encouragement. While an awful lot of the book is common-sense, the fact that it is all together in one place, and acts as a reminder, allows focus. So if you would like to live a more expanded and full life, this book holds your hand while you explore possibilities.
I think all of us at some time in our lives when we reach a certain age worry a little about cancer. I think the thought, “how will I react” crosses our minds occasionally. That this brave lady chooses to make her ordeal so public, she produced video diaries and tweets and now her written diary, has helped thousands. At the end of the book she encloses some messages of thanks, a few from those who didn’t make it. It is tear-jerking but it is also laced with humour. Throughout, whenever possible, she kept working, collecting the kids from school and running her hectic household with the enormous support of her wonderful partner. During the end stages of thirty sessions of chemo, she had to drive forty-odd miles round trip between work and school collection for a ten minute appointment her local hospital couldn’t do. Well she was certainly a fighter, although that is not what she calls herself. She believed talking about it really helped alleviate the fear and despair. She was diagnosed shortly after she started hosting a daily news and current affairs show for BBC2 and takes us through her fascinating work as well as the 301 days of treatment. A brave lady. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
From Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson a memoir that also shares some of the beliefs and teachings of his grandfather. Arun Gandhi believes that what his grandfather had to say about co-existence and tolerance is needed now more than ever. A deceptively simple book that has a powerful message about the level of inequality and unrest in the world today. ~ Sue Baker Like for Like Reading An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by M K Ghandi The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer
An extension of James Duigan’s clean and lean philosophy, a book that brings together diet, exercise and mindfulness to help readers create change in their lives. It aims to get everyone conscious of what they eat and how they move and find ways to become fitter and with a higher level of health, both mental and physical. ~ Sue Baker Like for Like Reading The Louise Parker Method: Lean for Life by Louise Parker Lean in 15 – The Shift Plan: 15-Minute Meals and Workouts to Keep you Lean and Healthy by Joe Wicks
Surprising, provocative and thoroughly entertaining, this is a book filled with 628 thunks. A thunk is quite simply a question that not only makes you think, it has the potential to alter your thoughts. You can read the thunks on your own and have a good old ponder, or read them in company to stimulate conversation, you can simply answer yes or no, or spend a considerable while debating your thoughts. Author Ian Gilbert is described as one of the UK’s leading educational innovators, and the thunks certainly suggest a unique mind. Stimulating and clever, The Compleat Thunks Book is a different, imaginative way to spark thought and conversation.
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We all need a little direction sometimes and this section is crammed full of great ideas for ways of improving your outlook, in all aspects of your wellbeing. Help from the shelf. From tips for good nutrition and taking care of your body (Optimism: Reflections on a Life of Action by Bob Brown) to coping with all the emotional situations in life, relationships, bereavements, stress, depression (Mind Whispering: A New Map to Freedom from Self-defeating Emotional Habits by Tara Bennett-Goleman). Discover the potential you have for being the ‘you’ you’ve always wanted to be or the ‘you’ you had no idea was in there.
Take a look at our monthly recommendations to find exactly what you’re looking for. Bear in mind though (and even ‘body and spirit’ too …), that just ‘reading’ them may not be enough. There’ll be homework!