Recipes for an Aching Heart: Healthy & Easy Meals to Help You Heal from Grief, Loss, or the Stress of Everyday Life

Have you ever been in a period of life where normal, everyday responsibilities feel overwhelming? Where even getting out of bed in the morning is a feat, let alone making a meal for yourself and your family? If so, this book is for you.

This might be a time of loss, or a time where you're caring for a sick loved one, or simply a confluence of life factors that makes you feel like you're paddling to stay above water. For Chef Laura Lea, this debilitating season showed up unwelcomely after going through divorce in 2018.

Five years into her business as a holistic chef she was under the daily pressure to display healthy routines and keep up appearances. But reality left her with no appetite and lacking the motivation to even step into the kitchen.

In the attempt to cope she found herself relying on fast-food, junky snacks and lots of wine. Burying herself in binge-watching shows, she sought anything that would quickly fix the discomfort of the situation she was in. After years of obsessing over a "perfectly healthy" lifestyle, these dietary indulgences helped ease her relationship with food and diet.

Ultimately these choices hindered the process of healing from divorce. Instead contributing to her overall feelings of sadness, self-loathing, and exhaustion. She needed a way out.

Drawing upon her decade in the wellness industry and a newfound understanding of the science of grief, she built "The Heartache Protocol." This set of lifestyle and fitness choices, tools for emotional regulation, and suggestions for heartache-specific wellness.