Make Your Own Rules Diet Review

Two days until the transfer! Every day I get more and more nervous - today I've wanted to cry a few times, though I suspect being injected full of hormones has something to do with it too.

On days like these I'm really happy to be able to do a little bit of yoga, just to center myself and focus on something besides being nervous. I'm not sure how much I've talked about my yoga practice here - long story short, I went to classes for about a year when I first moved here, and then took an eight-or-so-year break, and maybe a year and a half ago I started again. The catalyst for restarting my yoga practice was a keynote speech about yoga and fertility by Tara Stiles.

Though I take weekly classes taught by a fantastic local teacher, I sometimes follow along with Tara's flows at home via YouTube or DVD, and I really like her philosophy of making yoga accessible and relatable to everyone. And now she's taking that yoga philosophy and applying it to a more holistic approach in her new book Make Your Own Rules Diet.

I think "diet" is actually misleading, because it really isn't a diet book. It's more of a lifestyle guide than anything else, with an end result of you trusting your intuition and listening to your body in order to make good healthy choices for your body and your soul.

Tara breaks the book down into three areas of focus: the mat, the cushion, and the kitchen. The mat section details some easy asanas (positions) and provides a couple of flows. The cushion section takes you through meditation. And the kitchen, of course, is all about simple vegan recipes.

I played with two recipes from this book in the past few days, and am excited to purchase the book so that I can play with even more. I love that the recipes are so easy - a lot of vegan recipes that I see in cookbooks rely on fancy ingredients that I don't really have on hand, and I'm not a natural vegan so the quickest way to my heart is to show me how easy it can be.

The first recipe I tried was the Roasted Acorn Squash Soup. It has only six ingredients: acorn squash (I tried yellow this time), onion, olive oil, red pepper, water and almond milk. Super simple, and now we have dinner for the next couple of days (because I doubled the recipe)! One thing I will say about these recipes is that they're so simple that they could use a little dressing up with spices - I used some red pepper flakes and cracked black pepper for a little bite.

The second recipe I tried was the Healthy Frosty. Now if you're a frequent Wendy's customer and is the kind of person who likes dipping their fries into their Frosty, you will notice that this is not a faithful reproduction. But I kind of like it better! Again, only 7 ingredients, and the addition of cinnamon really gives this smoothie the flavor boost that it needs. Also, blended frozen bananas are awesome. So awesome, that I made this smoothie and immediately drank it, leaving no time for a photo. Oops.

There are also a couple of schedules that you can follow if you want to try the yoga-meditation-eating philosophy for a week or a month.

Anyway, if you're interested in taking a peek at the book, you can do that and more at Tara's website. I highly recommend yoga and meditation especially for those of you who are dealing with the stress and uncertainty that comes with infertility. It helps me immensely.