Hi there! I’m Vered DeLeeuw, a blogger, a foodie, a wife and a mom. I’m so excited that you found my healthy recipes blog!
I started Healthy Recipes in 2011, out of sheer necessity.
You see, back in 2010, my husband was diagnosed with pre diabetes.
We immediately cut out sugar, white flour and processed foods.
His blood sugar kept climbing.
We experimented for a while with whole-wheat, low-sugar baking, and with high-fiber vegetarian dishes based on brown rice, quinoa, beans and lentils.
His blood sugar kept rising.
The doctor told him to lose 10 percent of his already healthy body weight. He did.
His blood sugar remained elevated.
My husband is an avid cyclist, and one day, riding with a friend, he told that friend about his frustrating experience. The friend said, “it’s not about how much you eat; it’s about what you eat. You need to lower your carb intake. You should try The South Beach Diet, or a similar low carb diet.”
So after three years of following the doctors’ advice and still having high blood sugar, in 2013 we took our friend’s advice and switched to a low-carb, high-fat diet. I decided to join my husband, both for moral support and because by then, I too showed signs of difficulty processing carbohydrates – I had frequent hypoglycemic episodes.
We focused on protein (meat, seafood, eggs and aged cheeses), healthy fats, non-starchy vegetables, and low-sugar fruit, supplemented with the occasional low carb dessert.
After three months on this low carb diet, my husband’s blood sugar levels normalized. My hypoglycemic episodes disappeared.
We’ve been eating a low carb, mostly grain free and paleo diet for the past five years. It became my mission to develop healthy and delicious recipes, and to tweak old favorites and make them low carb and grain free.
It’s really important to us to eat well. We are both foodies, and having eaten at top restaurants all over the world, we will not settle for mediocre healthy food. We need food to taste good! (Follow me on Instagram to see the awesome food we eat out of the house).
It’s also important to us to eat not just low carb but also clean – real, honest, whole foods. We want to feed our bodies the way nature has intended – not the processed junk that has taken over the supermarket aisles, but simple, healthy, home cooked meals.
When I started cooking healthy meals, I documented my recipes in this blog, as a way to keep all my recipes organized. Gradually, I realized that people were finding my recipes and responding to them. I started receiving emails from grateful readers. So I turned this blog from a hobby into my full time job.
This is the best job I’ve ever had! I love creating healthy recipes and photographing them. I love how this blog has taught me so much not just about healthy eating, but also about running a blog, taking great food photos, shooting and editing videos, optimizing the blog for search engines so that people can actually find my recipes, and in general, making it the very best it can be.
It’s really important to me to emphasize here that for my husband and I, low carb is not a fad or a passing trend. It’s not a temporary weight loss diet. For us, low carb is a way of life that we’ve been living for the past five years. It’s the only way we have found to save ourselves from eventual diabetes and its terrible complications – blindness, amputations and dialysis.
Please check out my FAQ section for a more detailed explanation of my food philosophy. If you need to reach me, please email HealthyRecipesBlog [at] gmail [dot] com. Thank you so much for visiting, and bon appétit!