When I began reading Chill Out & Get Healthy, I thought, “Here we go with another Skinny Bitch book.” In similar form, the intro opens with a sassy tone, a tough-love lecture, and is scattered with plenty of cuss words (author Aimee Raupp’s mantra throughout her pages is Chill the F*** Out). But then I hit this sentence: "Do you think soy is good for you and eat it in every form: tofu, soy milk, SoyJoy bars?" That’s when I realized Raupp was heading in a drastically different direction than Skinny Bitch. (For the record, I thought Skinny Bitch was hilarious. I just couldn’t buy the notion that it’s good to eat soy milk, soy cheese, soy burgers, soy chicken, tofu eggs, etc.)

To put it bluntly, Raupp believes that “soy sucks.” She says, “Most soy products on the market are made from overly processed and more than likely genetically modified soybeans that have the nutritional equivalent of plastic.” As someone struggling with fertility, I’ve been reading up on how soy has been linked with the disruption of hormone function and might cause estrogen-dominate diseases, like endometriosis. When I began investigating food labels, I was shocked to discover how much processed soy was lurking in my kitchen. It’s hidden in, well, practically every food that comes with an ingredients list: my organic rice-based veggie burgers, my multigrain crackers, and my morning cereal.

When you do eat soy, Raupp encourages doing so sparingly and sticking to fermented versions like miso (after all, the healthy folks in Asian countries who have been eating soy for centuries consume miso, not nofurky, Raupp reminds us). Even if you don’t fall into the camp of soy-bashers, Chill Out & Get Healthy covers plenty of other topics of interest. Raupp has a background in Oriental medicine, so along with discussing dairy (yogurt is best), alcohol (vodka rocks), and all sorts of other foods (eggs, fish, nuts), she spends a lot of time addressing the importance of emotional well-being.

I added Chill Out & Get Healthy to my kitchen bookshelf. Its folded pages and marked up sections sit on the same row as The Maker’s Diet, Deceptively Delicious, The Fertile Female, The Hallelujah Diet, and, yes, even Skinny Bitch. These books all have different eating philosophies, but in the end, we have to decide for ourselves what nuggets to take with us and what to ignore. For me? I am making homemade veggie burgers this week – without soy.

Chill Out & Get Healthy: Live Clean to Be Strong and Stay Sexy by Aimee Raupp (New American Library, $15)