‘Instant Loss on a Budget’ is a wonderful, comprehensive cookbook with a huge variety of mouthwatering recipes. The focus is on cooking with real foods in an economical way. The recipes contained are all gluten-free and dairy-free. There are a number of vegetarian recipes and recommendations for vegetable protein as well. This is really an all-in-one cookbook, which would be great for beginner cooks and anyone on a strict budget. At the beginning, there is a lot of handy information including: tips for saving money on groceries, sample menus including cost for each recipe, a pressure cooker cook-time cheat sheet, etc. Some of the recipes are pretty simple and standard American fare, but some recipes are more sophisticated and elaborate. Beautiful photography accompanies most of the recipes. I strongly recommend this one!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC of this book.

I love Brittany Williams and this book is no exception! Great recipes, great photos, and an awesome presentation. My only issue is that I don’t know how budget friendly the recipes will be if you’re in an area where food is expensive, any kind of alternative flours etc are going to be pricey. Otherwise, loved it. Thank you for the ARC!

Thank you to Houton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for this copy of Instant Loss on a Budget Super-Affordable Recipes for the Health-Conscious Cook by Brittany Williams. It publishes December 29, 2020.
What an inspiring book that’s not only a great cookbook with great tips, but also has meal plans, shopping lists, and great ideas for ingredient substitutes!
I highly recommend this and think it would make a great gift!

This cookbook has some really wonderful recipes in it. In addition to that, it also has a lot of tips on how to eat healthy on a budget. My only complaint is that there aren't enough pictures of the recipes.

Instant Loss on a Budget is a diet plan, information guide, and cookbook with recipes developed by Brittany Williams. Due out 29th Dec 2020 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it's 352 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats.
The recipes are grouped roughly thematically: baked goods, breakfasts, party appetizers, soups, salads, sides, pasta, restaurant favorites, meatless, land & sea, drinks, desserts, and basics (sauces, seasonings, ingredient recipes). Each of the recipes includes an introductory description, ingredients listed in a bullet point sidebar (US measurements only), step by step instructions, as well as footers with tips and alternative suggestions and some tips on presentation. Nutritional info oddly not included (in a diet book?). Special tools and ingredients are also listed, along with yields and cooking directions. The ingredients are mostly easily sourced at any moderately well stocked grocery store.

The recipes are varied, delicious, and attractive. The author makes some very salient points about the types of food (especially proteins) we choose and how that has follow on effects for weight loss and food budget. She's included some meal plans as well as clear and useful charts for cooking times for pressure cooking vegetables, grains, legumes, etc. Each of them has an estimated prep cost in a header graphic over the recipe.

The photography is not abundant; maybe 10% of the recipes are pictured, at a rough estimate. The recipes which are included are clear and easy to follow and the serving suggestions are attractive and appropriate. There are a lot of things to like about this collection - the writing is upbeat and no-nonsense. The author has a very supportive and encouraging style. The lack of photos detracts somewhat as does the lack of nutritional info, but overall this is a very good collection of healthy recipes.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Super helpful! I am currently trying to lose weight and budget so this book is perfect. CNt wait for try some recipes!!

I love Brittany's story and how she used one really awesome kitchen appliance to meet her weight loss goals. She is such an inspiration and her recipes sound delicious! She didn't deprive herself of things that taste good, she just tweeked recipes to make them healthier and used my favorite appliance in my kitchen the Instant Pot to do so. I have packed on several extra pounds that I am not proud of, but I know if she can do it, I too can utilized my Instant Pot to get myself back to a healthy weight. I look forward to try these recipes.

I was excited to receive this digital ARC, I don't know who Brittany Williams is so my request for this ARC is based on the subject. It was just an okay recipe book for me, it does have some helpful pointers on keeping budget tight and some recipes are quite delicious looking. I do wish there are nutritional charts, that would have been a great addition. Overall, this book is good for those who has the same dietary restrictions like the author.

I really like this cookbook! It's a beautiful book and very clean and well organized. The photos are gorgeous and make me want to try them right now! Another thing interesting about this cookbook is that it shows you how much the recipe costs! Most of the ingredients you might have at home if you're already trying to cook/bake using healthier options but if you're new to it, you will need to get stuff like coconut sugar, oat flour and almond flour. Seeing the kids eating red pepper as a snack was very cute and I love that they showed these moments in the book! I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

This is a wonderful cookbook. I know how difficult dieting on a budget can be frustrating. This gives you many many options.

I thought this was such a great cookbook. I thought it was well researched and I liked how Brittany Williams was able to break down the recipes and how much it will roughly cost and how to make most of your budget and still get healthy delicious food. All of her recipes look delicious and wrote down a few of them to try on my own.

This will be a great book for the target audience, but not quite as good a fit for others. Williams apparently has a big following on her blog and with her other cookbooks, which promise to teach you how to lose weight and save money by making simple, healthy, inexpensive family meals.

The book follows her rather specific diet, which will work for many families but others might not find a good fit. She is intolerant to gluten and dairy and avoids refined sugar, so the recipes don't contain any of these. She also is frugal and uses smaller amounts of meat for this purpose, but there is generally meat in the recipes (like a half a pound of ground beef or a smaller portion of chicken breast). There are some vegetarian meals in addition, but vegetarian readers will have to modify many recipes. She relies very heavily on honey and also uses eggs in addition to meats so it's not going to be a great fit for vegans. While she is gluten free, she makes most of her breads and baked goods with oat flour (ground oats), sometimes with almond flour added in and occasionally with specialty flours like cassava flour and chickpea flour. Many people who are intolerant to gluten are also intolerant to oats, so this is another area where the recipes work for her specific needs but not necessarily the reader's.

Williams relies on the same ingredients repeatedly, which makes for cheaper grocery store excursions but can feel repetitive. They are frequently build around oats and oat flour, oat milk (her milk of choice in most cases, basically oats blended with water), ground beef, chicken breast, cilantro, honey, bananas, oat yogurt (recipe provided, not suitable for vegetarians, Instant Pot required) and some others. She provides a total of the estimated cost of each recipe which is nice. Most of them are still more expensive than most of the recipes I make for my (bigger) family, but I guess this is assuming people don't find the most frugal ways to source ingredients. Sometimes her shopping list calls for things like half a piece of fruit, which makes the estimated cost a little big tricky.

One of my biggest gripes is that there is no nutritional information provided. For a health conscious cookbook, I find this maddening. She says that this is because if you eat healthy foods you don't need to count calories or nutrients, but again that's true for HER and not for every one of her readers. Many people have to (or want to) count sodium, protein, fiber, fat, carbs/sugars, etc. I frequently found recipes I wanted to try but I need to concentrate on high fiber and protein dishes right now as I'm still recovering from a serious illness and have found that it's really important in my healing. Likewise, my husband is monitoring his carbohydrates and sugars, and it's so frustrating not to have that information. She says her second reason is that ingredients differ in nutritional profile so if readers have to have that information they should calculate it themselves. That makes no sense. Readers are going to plug the info into an app that will be even less accurate than whatever the publisher could have done, and it will take them a ridiculous amount of time to check every recipe they're interested in to see if it meets their needs. I would not purchase this cookbook personally for this reason alone, as none of the recipes were that fantastic that it would warrant having to put that much effort into compiling all that information myself.

Williams is also dairy-free, so the recipes are dairy-free. Sometimes she says you can substitute dairy like a bit of parmesan but for the most part it's dishes that are just without cheese, butter, cream, etc. As mentioned, she generally uses homemade oat milk for anything that would ordinarily use milk. Small amounts of olive oil are used instead of butter. Again, this will be a great fit for some, but may leave other readers without recipes that appeal to them or meet their own tastes.

There are beautiful photos for most of the recipes and that's a huge plus for the book. Williams is also very likeable and encouraging. She makes a great mentor for people who are new to healthy cooking and to not relying on purchased foods. Her main audience seems to be mothers who are overweight and facing health problems who say they can't afford to buy healthy foods, and she does a good job of showing them how it can be done with her particular style of eating. There are testimonials throughout the book of people who wrote to say that her methods worked well for them.

Also, it should be obvious from the title but it wasn't to me -- many of these recipes are written for the Instant Pot. A few others are written for an air fryer, though those ones generally give alternate baking instructions. MANY of the recipes need an Instant Pot, though, so if you don't have one this won't be a terribly helpful book.

If you connect with her target audience, this may be a fantastic book for your needs. Others might want to preview it at the library to see if it's a good fit.

I read a digital ARC of this book for review.

It is so important to find good food choices that are affordable. That is the basic premise of this book, and the author explains her journey in how she developed her system. There are some amazing protein substitutions that don't break the bank. She has some really great tools for creating budgets and meal plans that you can easily follow. Another tip is to freeze things!

This book is chocked full of ideas and plans to keep you going. I highly recommend getting this book if you need help with your food purchasing.

Compressive book with lots of recipes, but also a great introduction. Nice pictures, but I wished overall that there would have been more in the book. Also, I missed the nutrition info on the recipes since it is kind of a diet book.

Wonderful,cookbook so many delicious recipes to try.Love the layout and the photographs,#netgalkey#hmh

I enjoyed this budget based cookbook for eating healthier. This is a real gem of a find because the author factors in price of the meal for you when a majority of people say eating healthier is more costly. Pantry list, menu list, planning all to help make budget eating a little more simple.

What did I like? I love the idea that you can lose weight by simply eating foods that are good for you. There is a meal plan and according to the website instantloss.com plenty of people have enjoyed the help. The author really breaks it down for you but you have to be willing to adopt a mindset and follow the practices. I enjoyed some of the beautiful pictures in the book, and bookmarked some recipes to try.

Would I recommend or buy? I’m all for eating healthier and avoiding processed foods. I like to enjoy a lot of vegetable based dishes and cut out a ton of meat. I think the author does a great job of presenting the budget idea in the book and she lives off 150$ biweekly meal plan. That allows you to save money for other things. That’s a low amount for a family of five but the author shows the recipe prices as well. I would love a copy of this book.

I received a complimentary copy and voluntarily left a review. Five stars...loved it.

Absolutely loved this and while I can't try all the recipes before the pub date, I loved the layout, pictures, recipes, and feel of the book!

Instant Loss on a Budget gives some good recipes, but I don’t see the budget in it. Many of the ingredients used are rather expensive, or maybe they are cheap in the US, but not in the Netherlands, where I live. I don’t mind so much as I wasn’t mainly interested in the budget part of the title. I can see that cutting out some food groups might work for some to lose some weight, but for me this never worked. A good mix of all the groups and minding the portions is what works for me. I tried 2 recipes for dinner and they turned out great, so that’s nice.
One other thing, a lot of recipes call for either an air fryer or pressure cooker, two things I don’t have and don’t intend to buy, some suggestions for other options would have been nice.

This is a great cookbook.
It has recipes for everything - breakfast, appetizers, soups, salads, pasta, restaurant favorite options, meatless, desserts and basics. The book starts with tips and techniques for beginners and also provides substitute options in some recipes
Only thing i felt missing was nutritional info of the recipes as it would have been very helpful if this is being considered by diet conscious person
I recommend this book for people who want healthy food within a reasonable budget. Thank you Netgalley for the ARC

I love the fact that this book has estimated costs for each meal! The only downfall is the electronic version is not formatted well, with the directions before the ingredients.