Reading Recommendations and Last Minute Christmas Gift Ideas for the Person Interested in Health 🎄

Think of this post as a reading list for the new year.

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a post I should have written several weeks ago except that the idea didn’t occur to me.

However, most of these gifts are books that come in the mail very quickly. So if you need a last-minute gift idea, this post may be just in time. Alternatively, for the uber planners, think of this post as your head-start on Christmas ideas for next year. 🤣

One important caveat: please don’t see this post as advocating buying health or fasting books as gifts for people you think need them. That is the surest way to alienate someone. These are gift ideas for people who have expressed interest in learning more and whom you know want help in this way.

If you have someone in your life who needs this info but you don’t know how to broach the topic, the very best strategy is to start working on yourself. After you’ve had some success, gently share with others the blessings of the changes you’ve seen. It’s never a bad idea to have some extra books on hand to hand out when people seem interested, just don’t give them at birthdays or Christmas without knowing the person wants them.

Another idea of how to use this list: In my extended family, we use the website Giftster to compile wishlists of things we want. You could put these books on your wishlist for the future.

Lastly, think of this list as reading ideas for the new year.

1. Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon: For the person interested in cooking healing foods

I’m going to be so bold as to say this is an absolute must-read for everyone who is a human being. You live in a body—nothing you can do about it. Your body needs to be nourished. There has been so much lost wisdom that needs to be recovered. Read a few pages at a time and put one thing into practice. Then read a few more pages. Try another thing. Part cookbook, part helpful explanation for why to eat this way.

2. The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon: For the person who wants to grow as a cook but needs inspiration (all of us)

Supper of the Lamb remains one of my all-time favorite books because Capon understands people as beings who eat, not merely to get calories into their bodies, but to enjoy and feast on life. The book is a poignant meditation on cooking while also casting a beautiful vision for enjoying life well through God's good gift of food. This vision is cast through humble reflections on eating simple yet carefully prepared meals with an eye for how God speaks to us through food and creation.

When I last read this book several years ago, I determined not to be a hearer only but also a doer, so it sparked my foray into making bone broth, a practice that continues to his day. This one change has had a tremendously positive impact on my cooking.

A few years after reading this book, after I’d thrown myself passionately into fasting, I was intrigued to again pick up the book and read the following quote on the back cover that I had forgotten I had ever read:

Should a true man want to lose weight, let him fast. Let him sit down to nothing but coffee and conversation, if religion or reason bid him do so; only let him not try to eat his cake without having it. Any cake he could do that with would be a pretty spooky proposition—a little golden calf with dietetic icing, and no taste worth having. Let us fast, then—whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat.

There was the answer to all my diet troubles, hiding in plain sight, yet I simply did not have the ears to hear it until returning to the book a few years later.

Capon, writing in 1967, saw through all the diet fads that would plague the next five decades. He knew long before IF was “a thing,” that fasting and then feasting on rich, nourishing foods has always been the answer.

I also love this quote from chapter 15 “The Long Session” (pg 171 from the hardcover version):

The dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being—a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to last forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner for six, eight, or ten chosen guests, the true convivium—the long Session that brings us nearly home.