Lisa Masé

Find your ideal foods and cultivate wellness with traditional wisdom. Exploring the healing power of food, holistic nutritionist Lisa Masé weaves together three ancestral healing philosophies—Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and the Mediterranean diet—with modern nutrition science to help you discover your ideal foods for vibrant health. The author frames her book with her healing journey to overcome ten years of chronic infection, anxiety, depression, infertility, hypothyroidism, and food sensitivities. She explains how she grew up in Italy, cradled by the Adriatic Sea and the Dolomite mountains, and by returning to her traditional foods and healing herbs she was able to heal herself. She discusses the three kinds of hunger—Heart, Head, and Habit—and offers proven folk and scientific strategies for transforming cravings and changing habits, including meditation, breathwork practices, and realignment of the gut-brain axis via the vagus nerve. Detailing the healing principles behind Ayurveda, TCM, and the Mediterranean diet, the author provides clear, easy-to-follow instructions for determining your Ayurvedic and Chinese constitution types, which can help you discover how best to heal yourself. She includes food lists for each constitution. Discussing the energetics of food, she explains the importance of personalized nutrition based on genetics, epigenetics, intuitive eating, and seasonal, local foods. She guides you on the path of food sovereignty to regain control of your food. Throughout the book, the author shares recipes, meal plans, and stories to illustrate the concepts she discusses and to help you easily integrate your ancestral healing wisdom into your life. Showing how to simplify your eating to cultivate wellness, this engaging and comprehensive guide to the culinary pharmacy provides all the knowledge and tools necessary to help you make your food your medicine.

With the title of her debut poetry chapbook, I Won't Be/long Here , poet Lisa Mas lets readers know from the start that she views language, like life, as changeable, and that just as parts of a word can be brought together or divided, so too can members of a family, different cultures, generations across time, ingredients in a simple recipe, to result in new meanings. These themes and more thread through the poems in I Won't Be/long Here , and as they do, Mas invites the reader to see things differently, from her own multi-faceted perspective across time as child, immigrant, daughter, sister, mother, and multilingual Italian-American woman now conjuring poems, allowing us to discover pieces of ourselves, to recognize how any given circumstance of life, like a word, may impart a feeling of being whole (having a sense of belonging ), altered (be/long ), or in transition (I won't be long here). With lines like "I am making a reduction of my life so I might understand yours" and "When you show me this wine in your kitchen, I remember the flavor of apples / picked that morning, the melt of spring butter over latticed crust / and a grandmother who splashed wine into our water to make us stronger," Lisa Mas shows that her sense of understanding and writing do belong here, in poetry, for a good long while.-Mary Elder Jacobsen, PoetLisa takes us on a journey to the beloved country of her birth in the ancestral Dolomites, braiding sweet and sour tales of her love of the land, traditions and rituals that formed her core values. Her rich heritage of recipes and language illuminate each story using flavorful words from her two worlds. Being uprooted from her original home, she was faced with a challenging childhood. Yet, through it all, she held on to the rich traditions, "singing a song echoed from the mountains" that witnessed her birth and filled her bones to navigate a truly inspirational life.-Jesse LoVasco, Author of Native (Homebound Publications)