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5:2 Vegetarian
The 5:2 Diet, also known as The Fast Diet, is gaining momentum worldwide as thousands of people who try it see how effective it is for weight loss and improving their general well-being. Many books about the diet focus on fish and meat and ignore the fact that as a vegetarian you are perfectly placed to follow the diet with amazing low-calorie vegetables. This book makes fast days interesting, fun and painless. Everything here is nutritious and vegetarian, with many vegan-friendly recipes. Most recipes are also gluten-free. The fast-day meal recipes are all super quick (30 minutes or less), accessible, satisfying, and nutrient-rich, yet all under 300 calories. If you’re cooking for non-fasters, there are suggestions for multiplying and bulking out the meals for family members.
With an introduction to the 5:2 lifestyle, advice on how to stock your kitchen, and easy and delicious fast-day recipes for breakfast, snacks, main meals, flavour bombs, drinks, weekly meal planners, calorie charts and plenty of fasting tips, this is the book to change your life, for good.
Author Information
Celia Brooks was born in Colorado, USA, and moved to Britain in 1989. She now lives in north London. She discovered a passion for cooking while working as a life model for the artist Christiane Kubrick and subsequently ran a successful vegetarian catering company. As well as writing for magazines such as 'BBC Good Food', she makes regular television appearances on the UK Food channel and gives live demonstrations at numerous cookery schools. She is the author of 'New Vegetarian', 'World Vegetarian Classics', 'Entertaining Vegetarians' and Low-Carb Vegetarian'. She currently hosts gourmet food tours of London and is an avid advocate of the 5:2 Diet.
With an introduction to the 5:2 lifestyle, advice on how to stock your kitchen, and easy and delicious fast-day recipes for breakfast, snacks, main meals, flavour bombs, drinks, weekly meal planners, calorie charts and plenty of fasting tips, this is the book to change your life, for good.
Author Information
Celia Brooks was born in Colorado, USA, and moved to Britain in 1989. She now lives in north London. She discovered a passion for cooking while working as a life model for the artist Christiane Kubrick and subsequently ran a successful vegetarian catering company. As well as writing for magazines such as 'BBC Good Food', she makes regular television appearances on the UK Food channel and gives live demonstrations at numerous cookery schools. She is the author of 'New Vegetarian', 'World Vegetarian Classics', 'Entertaining Vegetarians' and Low-Carb Vegetarian'. She currently hosts gourmet food tours of London and is an avid advocate of the 5:2 Diet.
108 pages, ebook
First published December 19, 2013
2 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 16, 2014
I have been a vegetarian for over 12 years and struggled with my weight for even longer. I have tried every fad diet, and many doctor prescribed diets. I lost weight, but I quickly got bored and resented the constant restraint I had to live with and gained it back plus. I wanted freedom to eat food. I found this diet program when a friend forwarded me a video that showing the program and how it worked to lose weight and help rebuild the body.(Eat, Fast and Live Longer, Dr. Michael Mosley BBC) I have been on it for over 6 months and lost significant weight, I feel fantastic, I have energy and I don’t feel controlled by a program. I enjoy the fast days, I feel like I’m rebuilding and cleaning my ‘house’. It has been a little bit of a struggle to find vegetarian dishes that fit in easily. I spent a lot of time searching and calculating my days calories and nutrition. Then I saw this book, and I’m became a happy girl.
Fast Days, you are hungry and you don’t need to be standing in the kitchen fussing with meals. There are 300 calorie meals ( about), servings sized for 1-2 servings and they are quick, 30 minutes or less. The nutritional information is included, making it perfect. The Thai Salad Wraps with Tofu, and Eggs Poached in Red Pepper Sauce are my favorites. Every recipe I tried has been very tasty and satisfying. There is also a selection of “Flavor Bombs” to add to Bam ! to your feast. The Green Lightning Salsa is so good I could eat it everyday on just about anything.
This small book is packed with easy quick planned dishes, making it easy for fast days. I plan on keeping ti handy and buying one for my friend who got me hooked on this program that works so well for me.
Fast Days, you are hungry and you don’t need to be standing in the kitchen fussing with meals. There are 300 calorie meals ( about), servings sized for 1-2 servings and they are quick, 30 minutes or less. The nutritional information is included, making it perfect. The Thai Salad Wraps with Tofu, and Eggs Poached in Red Pepper Sauce are my favorites. Every recipe I tried has been very tasty and satisfying. There is also a selection of “Flavor Bombs” to add to Bam ! to your feast. The Green Lightning Salsa is so good I could eat it everyday on just about anything.
This small book is packed with easy quick planned dishes, making it easy for fast days. I plan on keeping ti handy and buying one for my friend who got me hooked on this program that works so well for me.
May 30, 2017
There are some great recipes in this book. I've made a few already - the vegetable and chickpea tagine was very nice as was the south Indian mango curry and I like the use of palm hearts. I don't like the lack of pictures though and I thought that chapter 2 was unnecessary.
One of my main bug bears in the book is the description of the serving sizes to be large when they are definitely not! again it just seems unnecessary and saying 'serves 1' instead would be fine. I am making the potato and egg salad for lunch and 100g of new potatoes is basically 3 tiny potatoes! Definitely not a larger helping. I know that this is a 5:2 book so calories are obviously important. I just wish she would stop saying that all the servings are large!
One of my main bug bears in the book is the description of the serving sizes to be large when they are definitely not! again it just seems unnecessary and saying 'serves 1' instead would be fine. I am making the potato and egg salad for lunch and 100g of new potatoes is basically 3 tiny potatoes! Definitely not a larger helping. I know that this is a 5:2 book so calories are obviously important. I just wish she would stop saying that all the servings are large!
November 14, 2019
A useful addendum to the 5:2 book as that concentrates on meat and fish neither of which I eat! There are some great recipes in here that I would love to try out (and some I will give a miss to - but hey that is the nature of recipe books!)
February 3, 2014
5:2 Vegetarian. Over 100 Fuss-free & Flavourful Recipes for the Fasting Diet. Celia Brooks
Review from Jeannie Zelos Book reviews.
At age 9 my youngest child decided she was going to be a vegetarian. 24 years later she's still one, and doesn't consume anything that's needed an animal to be killed. For her it was, and still is, a moral issue. One thing about this is that we've learned over the years to be very careful when looking at labels for what they contain, and as a side product we've discovered just how high in fats or calories many products are. Then came the Fast diet. Seems the world and his wife have tried it, its vouched as easy to sustain and fit into everyday life, so very different from many diets, and devotees claim it really works. So seeing this book I was excited because it leans over to the vegetarian side, something so rarely done. Conventional diet books list lots of lean meat and fish as basic, then a quick nod to the vegetarians by saying swap for Quorn. If you don't like Quorn, or don't want to eat it daily well...tough :)
This book is full of Fast day menus that are fun and interesting, appetising and varied. Very many are Vegan too, a sector that's even worse treated than vegetarians. Why one wonders, when we have so many wonderful low calorie tasty fruits and vegetables around. It just takes someone to put those in a format that's quick and easy to browse. When you're on a diet the last thing we want is to browse through cookery books full of gorgeous but high cal/fat recipes :) The suggestions for increasing quantities and adding extras for non vegetarians are useful too, turning a fast day basic into a family meal.
With many people eating very little fruit and veg daily, adding the recipes from this book into family life while one member is fasting will benefit everybody health wise, and hopefully set up healthy eating values for life. There's simple advice from what to stock in your cupboards, to how to cook and prepare foods for best results, calorie charts, (always useful and essential on a 5:2 diet) and lots of tips on how best to incorporate this diet into a lifelong healthy eating habit. I've often found that non fiction doesn't always get justice read on kindle, its not easy to flip through sections and the beautiful illustrations get lost, but this book worked well. Its not illustrated so nothing is lost there, and the chapters are very well divided so its easy to use them to get straight to what you want to read. It's priced at £4.99 for kindle, £8.99 for paperback for 1834 KB.
Stars: five, a really useful book for anyone interested in healthy eating, not just the Fast Diet.
ARC supplied by Netgalley.
Review from Jeannie Zelos Book reviews.
At age 9 my youngest child decided she was going to be a vegetarian. 24 years later she's still one, and doesn't consume anything that's needed an animal to be killed. For her it was, and still is, a moral issue. One thing about this is that we've learned over the years to be very careful when looking at labels for what they contain, and as a side product we've discovered just how high in fats or calories many products are. Then came the Fast diet. Seems the world and his wife have tried it, its vouched as easy to sustain and fit into everyday life, so very different from many diets, and devotees claim it really works. So seeing this book I was excited because it leans over to the vegetarian side, something so rarely done. Conventional diet books list lots of lean meat and fish as basic, then a quick nod to the vegetarians by saying swap for Quorn. If you don't like Quorn, or don't want to eat it daily well...tough :)
This book is full of Fast day menus that are fun and interesting, appetising and varied. Very many are Vegan too, a sector that's even worse treated than vegetarians. Why one wonders, when we have so many wonderful low calorie tasty fruits and vegetables around. It just takes someone to put those in a format that's quick and easy to browse. When you're on a diet the last thing we want is to browse through cookery books full of gorgeous but high cal/fat recipes :) The suggestions for increasing quantities and adding extras for non vegetarians are useful too, turning a fast day basic into a family meal.
With many people eating very little fruit and veg daily, adding the recipes from this book into family life while one member is fasting will benefit everybody health wise, and hopefully set up healthy eating values for life. There's simple advice from what to stock in your cupboards, to how to cook and prepare foods for best results, calorie charts, (always useful and essential on a 5:2 diet) and lots of tips on how best to incorporate this diet into a lifelong healthy eating habit. I've often found that non fiction doesn't always get justice read on kindle, its not easy to flip through sections and the beautiful illustrations get lost, but this book worked well. Its not illustrated so nothing is lost there, and the chapters are very well divided so its easy to use them to get straight to what you want to read. It's priced at £4.99 for kindle, £8.99 for paperback for 1834 KB.
Stars: five, a really useful book for anyone interested in healthy eating, not just the Fast Diet.
ARC supplied by Netgalley.
February 5, 2014
Before reading this book I had no idea what the 5:2 diet was. For those of you that don't know 5:2 is eating normal for five days of the week and fasting for two days (women eat only 500 calories during those two days and men eat only 600 calories). These two days do not have to be back to back but can be if you want. While I enjoyed some of the recipes and ideas especially in the flavour bomb chapter and simple snacks chapter I didn't think that this book was for me. While I would use some of the ideas for healthier meals overall the book did not have an overall appeal to me. I did like that each recipe included a breakdown on nutrition information and whether a recipe was gluten-free, dairy-free and/or vegan which would be helpful to readers if they need to know that type of information. Overall if you are interested in the 5:2 way of eating/lifestyle this book would probably be for you.
I recieved this advanced copy from Anova Books through Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.
I recieved this advanced copy from Anova Books through Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.
February 9, 2014
Not my taste. I have read about and tried the 5:2 Diet and was looking forward to some recipes that fit well with it. Unfortunately, these recipes are just not my taste. Usually I find at least a few recipes in a cookbook that I want to make even if I switch a few ingredients, but this one is just so not my taste that there are no recipes in it that I wish to even try. Many of the recipes have honey or agave nectar and there is a lot of soy, chilli and yogurt in them. She has a sweet and sour tofu recipe in the book and I think if you like sweet and sour, you might like these recipes. Someone who likes miracle whip rather than mayonnaise might like these recipes I think. Also, the author uses British terms and measurements in the recipes - although she does add in the American measurements and often, but not always, adds in the American terminology. I was a bit confused by a bit of the terminology a few times. I received this book free to review from Netgalley.
February 4, 2015
This book contains a lot of varied veggie recipes which is always good to see, and often lacking with a specialised diet, so I imagine for anyone following the 5:2 who is vegetarian this book would be a great asset.
The list of items needed, which is basically what you would find in the most simple of kitchens was surplus to requirement, in my opinion, but the recipes themselves are varied and tempting and I like the options the author includes for non fasting days.
With photographs, this would be a five star book.
I read a free copy of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The list of items needed, which is basically what you would find in the most simple of kitchens was surplus to requirement, in my opinion, but the recipes themselves are varied and tempting and I like the options the author includes for non fasting days.
With photographs, this would be a five star book.
I read a free copy of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
August 3, 2016
Decent vegetarian cookbook, with some good low calorie ideas, even if you are not doing the 5:2 diet. Also liked the tips at the end of the recipes for other family members who may be eating with you, but not with a restricted calorie intake. My biggest complaint is the lack of pictures of the recipes--a personal pet peeve for me.
*ARC courtesy of Anova Books, provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!*
*ARC courtesy of Anova Books, provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!*
May 23, 2022
Great ideas and I love that each recipe comes with info on calories, proteins etc. But sometimes the measurements are way off! Like the "minty chickpea soup" which is just lemony if you put in the prescribed "one lemon". So good ideas, but use some common sense with the flavours.
March 12, 2015
A good range of recipes for the low cal days for us vegies :)
October 13, 2014
Would've been 5* but a tad too much tofu!
January 23, 2015
excellent to find out how tasty and nourishing so few calories can make a dinner. Nice
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews