Bernadette Bohan’s The Choice: The Programme: The simple health plan that saved Bernadette’s life – and could help save yours too

To Ger, Richard, Sarah and Julie for their love and encouragement

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

A Personal Introduction

The Means to Better Health

My Story

A Food-fight for Life

Step One: Juice Up Your Life!

The Low-down on Juicing

Step Two: Powerful Foods

To Cook? Or Not to Cook?

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Nature’s Pharmacy

Step Three: Water – Pure and Simple

Water Should Just Be Water

Step Four: What’s Not on the Label?

Safe Personal Care

A Final Note…

The Recipes

Juices

Smoothies

Breakfasts

No-cook Soups

Cooked Soups

Fresh Main Meals

Cooked Main Meals

Snacks

Sides

Salads

No-cook Tasty Treats

Baked Treats

Resources

Bibliography and Recommended Reading

Index of Recipes

Preview

Other Books By

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Personal Introduction

I hope to show you that with some practical basic information you too can live a healthy life without having to become an expert or nutritionist.

The Means to Better Health

This is not rocket science…keep it simple and just do it!

Rather than concentrating on what you can’t eat, this book concentrates on what you can eat. I feel there is no need to waste time preaching about what you cannot eat, as I strongly believe that nowadays we are bombarded with too much of this kind of negative information. Instead, I find it more useful to suggest that you should add more nourishing foods to your daily routine eating patterns. Furthermore, this way offers you the means to discover that when your body is nourished, the constant cravings for junk food and treats will all but disappear. Even if you believe you presently lead a fairly healthy lifestyle, I assure you that nourishing your body further will bring about even more energy, will keep you feeling fantastic, and will culminate in giving you much greater health.

Maybe you are happy with your quality of life, but I suspect the fact that you bought this book means you may not be and you are looking for some sort of change. You may well want to ‘clean up your act’, but whether your interest in food stems from problems with your health or with maintaining your health, I hope this book will spark your imagination and illustrate how easy these goals are to achieve. I hope to show you how I, an ordinary woman and mother of three, having twice faced cancer, managed to transform my diet and lifestyle without any great hardship. I also hope to show you that with some basic practical information you too can live a healthy life without becoming an expert or a nutritionist.

My motivation for writing this book is a direct response to the many requests I received for more information on what I have done to improve my own health. It is also in response to the countless requests for simple and easy-to-follow recipes – recipes for food that can both protect us from disease and comfort and nourish the body. I have included in this book my recommendations surrounding the four changes that I made to my own lifestyle, namely:

These changes are simple and easy to implement if you have the motivation to do so. The benefits for me were many and helped me to recover from chemotherapy and radiation cancer treatments. For me the motivation was easy to understand: when diagnosed with cancer for a second time I wanted to find how to treat the cause of the disease and not just the symptoms. I discovered that nutrition plays a big part in combating the effects of degenerative diseases that affect so many of us. Never underestimate the value of good food – it can do more than sustain life! All research, to the highest level of biochemistry, exemplifies the benefits of maintaining health rather than waiting until we have a problem that needs to be fixed.

Nowadays many of us eat for comfort, and believe me I’m all for a bit of comfort, especially living in a cold damp climate like Ireland! There is nothing nicer than a warm soup or a hot dinner on a cold wet windy day, but our bodies have certain requirements that demand we also eat for nourishment. When we meet these requirements we get the body’s defence mechanisms functioning properly and achieve optimal health.

We can readily accept that machines need oil, fuel and water to run smoothly and to prevent them from breaking down. Likewise it is imperative that we supply the correct fuel to our bodies.

I was touched and impressed with an e-mail I recently received from a 13-year-old girl who, having read my first book The Choice, decided that she was going to try to look after her health a little better. This young girl is not much older than my own daughter Julie. She is not suffering from any ill-health and yet has the foresight, common sense and responsibility to want to take care of her health at this young age.

For me, healthy eating has become a great pleasure and has opened up many new tastes and ideas. These simple practical changes are easy to implement in day-to-day life no matter how busy you are, to help you improve your health. Ask yourself:

Believe me, I know exactly where you’re coming from. I now find that having opened up my diet to a much greater variety of foods, many of the foods I used to like now taste rather bland.

My experience has shown me that many of us have become collectors of information. Yet very often we are not prepared to put this information into practice. Remember that actions speak louder than words, and if diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, as I was on two occasions, you no longer have the luxury of time and you soon learn to focus on the job in hand. If only we could use our natural instincts and a little common sense to eat the foods that make us feel good, many of our health problems would disappear.

This is not rocket science – so my method is to keep it simple and JUST DO IT.

You too can also do it!

My Story

I was so determined in my quest to beat cancer that I immediately set about making some changes.

Whatever the outcome was to be, I was not about to sit around and wait until I got to the point of no return. I had to find a way to help myself.

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