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!
How Healthy Recipes was born
I started Healthy Recipes in 2011, out of sheer necessity. Back in 2010, my husband was diagnosed with prediabetes. We immediately cut out sugar, white flour and processed foods and replaced them with brown rice, quinoa and beans. But his blood sugar kept climbing.
The doctor suggested that he lose 10 percent of his already healthy body weight. He did, but his blood sugar remained elevated.
My husband is an avid cyclist. 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.”
Starting a whole-foods, low carb diet
In 2013 we took our friend’s advice and switched to a low-carb diet. We did this with the blessing of our family physician, who also helped us monitor our health with regular blood tests.
It’s always a good idea to make any major diet change with the blessing and supervision of a doctor. More and nore nutritionists and physicians these days do support a moderately low carb diet. The Harvard School of Public Health, for example, says that moderately low carb diets can be beneficial and that a focus on restricting carbohydrates, rather than calories, may work better for long-term weight control.
I decided to join my husband, and not just for moral support. By then, I too showed signs of difficulty processing carbohydrates. I had frequent hypoglycemic episodes.
So I started cooking healthy recipes! 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.
It took some trial and error, but eventually we both settled on a moderately low carb diet of between 50-100 grams of carbs per day.
It worked! After three months on this low carb diet, my husband’s blood sugar levels finally 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 delicious and healthy recipes, and to tweak old favorites and make them low carb and grain free (these almond flour biscuits are a good example).
This blog is not just about low carb, but also about tasty and healthy recipes
It’s really important to my husband and I to eat well. We are both foodies. Having eaten at top restaurants all over the world, we will not settle for mediocre healthy recipes. 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.
For my husband and I, healthy low carb eating 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. So we need to make it sustainable, which means tasty!
Blogging turned from a hobby into my full time job
When I started cooking healthy recipes, I documented them in this blog, as a way to keep all my recipes organized. Gradually, I realized that people were finding my healthy 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, and shooting and editing videos. I also learned to optimize the blog for search engines so that people can actually find my recipes. And in general, making this website the very best it can be.
Have more questions?
Please check out my FAQs for a more detailed explanation of my food philosophy. Here’s my recipe index. Legal terms for using this website are here, and the website’s privacy policy is here.
If you need to reach me, please email HealthyRecipesBlog [at] gmail [dot] com. Thank you so much for visiting, and bon appétit!