Learn about ways to improve and live with chronic illnesses at Festival
Healthy meals and new ways to deal with chronic diseases and conditions will be at the heart of an informative talk.
Emily Johnson will be appearing at Wolverhampton Literature Festival to talk about her debut cookbook "Eat Well With Arthritis", a book which presents a collection of 85 recipes and expert advice on adapting cooking techniques to alleviate pain from conditions such as arthritis.
The talk will take place on Sunday, February 4 at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and will see Ms Johnson talk about how nutrition and life-style changes can help people manage their conditions and get their lives back on track.
Ms Johnson said she could speak from experience, having first been diagnosed with arthritis when she was 20-years-old and then having a spell of severe illness in 2013 which was diagnosed as inflammatory arthritis.
She said: "It was pretty bad back then and took me a long time to get into a better place, with medication seeming to work, but then I had a really bad flare up and basically just hit rock bottom and thought I might not be able to carry on with this condition when my medication wasn't working.
"I went online to look at things like arthritis diets and things that could help, but didn't find anything so, in 2018, I set up Arthritis Foodie and started anonymously blogging a food diary and seeing what would help me with my condition and chronic pain.
"After three months, I started to feel a lot better and felt a massive difference in my overall wellbeing and pain levels, so while I'm still on medication, I've reduced the amount I'm taking, so I'm doing really well now."
Ms Johnson said she had spoken to people about her change and had been asked about where people could get information, so wrote her first book "Beat Arthritis Naturally: Supercharge your health with 65 recipes and lifestyle tips from Arthritis Foodie" in 2019, with help from a number of healthcare professionals.
She said a lot of her writing in her new book had been about personal experience of foods, with training taking place to become a nutritionist, and was a way to help people find new ways to reduce their conditions through diet changes.
She said: "I've found it helped reduce my inflammation, which is quite high with an autoimmune disease, but even with osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis, you can have quite a high level of inflammation in your system.
"If you're then going and eating really inflammatory foods, which is stuff like highly processed foods, alcohol and smoking, it's going to make your inflammation worse, whereas if you do anti-inflammatory things, like what I speak about in my book, there's a chance you can reduce that inflammation and get it down to a more manageable level.
"That can mean eating more vegetables and pulses and legumes and beans and getting your nutrition from somewhere else."
Ms Johnson said she was excited about being part of the Literature Festival alongside names such as James O'Brien and Pauline Black and spoke about what she hoped that people could take away from her event.
She said: "I think that people be able to take away that there is always something you can do as when you live with a chronic condition, you can feel really helpless and have maybe a 10 to 15 minute window of being face to face with someone about their condition every six months.
"The rest of the time, you're dealing with it on your own or with medication and waiting to see the doctor, whereas there are so many hours in the day that you could be taking time and helping yourself and I think that's the message I want to get across.
"Even if you just do a small thing each day to help yourself, it's better than waiting a year to see a specialist and there are things you can do and you can still live.
"It's not just the nutrition, it's the whole lifestyle approach, such as getting your sleeping right, managing stress levels and not being scared to move, as well as taking care of your gut and looking after yourself."
"Eat Well With Arthritis" takes place at Wolverhampton Art Gallery at 11am on Sunday, February 4, with tickets costing £8 plus £1 booking fee.
To find out more and to book tickets, go to shorturl.at/brz47
