Excerpt: Sophie Uliano's 'Gorgeously Green Diet'

April 17, 2009 — -- Author Sophie Uliano is back with some more helpful tips to make your life a little cleaner and a little greener.

In her book, "The Gorgeously Green Diet: How to Live Lean and Green," Uliano explains how small changes in your diet can have a big impact, both for the environment and for your waistline.

Read an excerpt of her book below and then visit the "GMA" library for some more good reads.

How many times do you wind up at the end of a day feeling burned out? Wishing someone else, for once, could plan, shop, and cook? How often have you drawn a blank when trying to fi gure out what on earth to have for lunch, never mind what you're going to cook for dinner? If you're time challenged and living on a tight bud get, like many women, you've probably become bored and totally disillusioned with food, diets, and cooking. You know you should be preparing healthier meals, but what exactly does that mean? And how can you fi t it into your already frazzled day?

Many of us would love to be the perfect nontoxic mom/girlfriend with a washboard tummy and a gourmet organic dinner waiting, but reality hits. We're aching to do the right thing for ourselves and our planet, but how exactly do we go about this?

Although I try my best to lead a Gorgeously Green life, it's easy to become stressed, tired, and frustrated. There are days when I wind up galloping through my day, grabbing sugar-laden snacks, barely chewing my food, desperate to get the next thing ticked off my to do list. I realize that on these rushed days, I'm only half living my life because I'm missing the very tastes and textures, the details that should be bringing me joy.

It's become my passion and mission to change this, because ultimately I always want my eating choices to be the best they can be. I also want to be bursting with sparkling energy. I want to celebrate my love of great food with every mouthful I take. Food is the source of life, and yet, for the most part, we have totally lost that connection. Zipping through the grocery store, throwing garish convenience packets into our cart, has become a deadening experience. Not to mention our confusion about what we should and shouldn't be eating and, most notably, what, oh horror of horrors, will make us chubby. The irony is that, in our attempt to do the right thing, we are unwittingly eating the very foods that are making us fat, tired, and sick.

Unless the food you buy is minimally processed and packaged, unless it's locally produced and organic— in short, unless its Gorgeously Green— it's likely to be lacking in vitamins and loaded with toxins that could inhibit metabolism and lead to obesity. Convenience food might taste good for a few seconds, but the price we have to pay in terms of feeling worn out, sluggish, and empty is just not worth it. Low quality food is overstressing the planet and making it dangerously sick, too: Millions of pounds of pesticides and herbicides leach into our soil and dwindling clean water supplies, and our landfills are maxed out with obscene amounts of unnecessary food packaging. What we do to the planet, we do to ourselves, and vice versa.

It's high time that we put our health fi rst so that we can heal our worn- out bodies and our depleted planet. Now is the moment for change, and I have a great deal of hope that we can, one day at a time, take small steps to bring our health, energy, and even our skinny jeans back, while helping to make this planet habitable for our children's children. How we eat affects every day of our life and is the legacy we leave behind.

The other day, I was compelled to slow down as I found myself in the ramshackle kitchen of Bill Spencer on his organic farm in San Luis Obispo, California. I had dropped in on him, unannounced, as I had heard that he grew the most delicious heirloom tomatoes on Earth. Bill was out on his tractor but assured me that he could chat when he was done with the field if I didn't mind watching him cook, for it was baking day. I stood waiting in his sunny living room, looking out onto grapevines, olive trees, and apple orchards beyond.

Time suddenly stood still, and all I could hear were the baby lambs bleating in his front yard and the woodpeckers stashing acorns in the massive oak tree outside. Later, as Bill and I chatted, the aroma of his sourdough loaf, baking in the tiny oven, wafted over us, cozy and healing. We later ate it, still warm and slathered in soft, yellow butter. He handed me a slice of his award-winning Golden Girl tomato.