The Healthy Deviant

A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World

Want to be a healthy, happy person in an unhealthy world? Get ready to start breaking some rules.

Pilar Gerasimo, founding editor of Experience Life magazine, argues that in an unhealthy society like ours, being a healthy person requires choices and patterns so unconventional, they amount to a positive form of social deviance. For decades, we’ve been lectured by experts and authority figures on the importance of dieting, exercising, and living in prescribed ways. It seems as if we are constantly being flooded by advice, only to have that advice refuted and replaced by something new. Part manifesto, part new-era survival guide, The Healthy Deviant is a renegade handbook for those who want to beat the unhealthy odds. With insight and expertise, using hand-drawn illustrations and easy-to-grasp charts, Gerasimo explains how we can reclaim our health and happiness–by refusing to play games rigged against us, and by breaking away from the systems that have been breaking us down. Drawing on medical, psychological, and brain-science research, this book provides practical advice for enhancing the efficacy of any weight-loss, mindfulness, or health-improvement approach–without insisting on any one-size-fits all method or miracle cure. Gerasimo’s 14-day Healthy-Deviant Adventure Program presents a series of “Renegade Rituals” (plus daily readings, worksheets, reminders, and progress tracking tools) that put you firmly back in charge of your own wellbeing. For anyone interested in living with greater vitality and resilience, The Healthy Deviant offers fresh hope, renewed motivation, and a clear path toward a vibrant life of your own choosing.

A RADICAL APPROACH TO HEALTH: Focusing on “deviant” skills to get healthy, Gerasimo reframes the idea of diets and allows readers to use these practical skills with a range of diets and food interests, including Keto, Paleo, Whole30, vegan, and vegetarian. This book will appeal to those who have tried other diets and quick fixes without lasting effect, and who are interesting in reframing the focus of those approaches from a social perspective, making them more achievable.

IMPRESSIVE AUTHOR PLATFORM: Gerasimo is an award-winning health journalist, and was founding Editor-in-Chief of the Experience Life magazine (national paid circulation of 770,000 and an estimated reach of 3.2 million). She was also the Executive Editor of Healthy Living for Huffington Post and a longtime HuffPo blogger (visit https://www.huffingtonpost.com/topic/pilar-gerasimo for a selection of Pilar’s blogs). Gerasimo is currently co-host (with Dallas Hartwig, co-founder of the Whole30 program) of the popular health podcast “The Living Experiment” (http://livingexperiment.com), which earned a top-five spot on iTunes in its first week, and currently gets 30,000+ downloads per weekly episode. She is also a frequent speaker, workshop leader, and TV talking head on a variety of health-related topics.