I'm thrilled to introduce to you a young author, Sadie Radinsky, whose book Whole Girl has just been published through Sounds True. Sadie is baking her way to healthy living with the aim to empower herself and other teen girls. Read our full interview below!
Sadie Radinsky is a freshman at UC Berkeley, writer, and recipe creator. For six years, she has touched the lives of girls and women worldwide with her award-winning website wholegirl.com, where she shares feel-good paleo treat recipes and advice for living an empowered life. Her writing has been published in places such as MindBodyGreen, Shape, and The New York Times.
In her first book, Whole Girl, Sadie offers practices, tips, and exercises to help young women embrace their whole selves. Each chapter welcomes a different mood (like mad, blue, wild, cozy) to empower all parts of their lives. The book includes 45 delicious gluten-free, Paleo treat recipes.
Read Sadie's recent article in The New York Times.
“Approachable and engaging, Radinsky exudes best friend vibes … A useful, accessible self-help guide.”
KARIN GUTMAN: I know that your food journey began when you were 9 years old and feeling sick. Can you tell us what happened?
SADIE RADINSKY: One day, I started getting intense stomach pain, nausea, and fatigue, and it just wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t go to school, which was really hard. My parents took me to a lot of doctors, but nobody knew what was wrong. My mom had started hearing that people’s health issues were being solved by going gluten-free, so she suggested it to numerous doctors, but they all said that food wasn’t the issue. Finally, she decided to put me on a gluten-free diet anyway. Gradually, I began to feel better. Soon I got the energy to go to school again. And within about two months, all my symptoms were gone. I’ve been gluten-free ever since, and mainly grain-free as well, since I feel best that way.
KARIN: Do you have a theory on why some people are sensitive to gluten and some aren’t?
SADIE: I’ve been reading a lot over the years about gluten intolerance, and from what I’ve learned, our current gluten issues could exist because the wheat we eat nowadays is heavily altered and stripped of its natural form. Some doctors argue that more people are sensitive to gluten than we suspect, and gluten may be causing a whole host of health issues for folks—but we haven’t made the connection yet. Or, it could be that humans didn’t originally eat grains at all, because we were hunter-gatherers, so maybe it’s biologically hard for some people to digest. Again, this is not scientifically determined yet, just some hypotheses.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed, which hasn’t yet been explained by science, is that a lot of young women in particular are sensitive to gluten. I mean—most of my young female cousins and friends are sensitive to gluten, and it seems too common to be a coincidence. But who knows!
KARIN: How did you make your foray into cooking and recipe-making, especially at such a young age?
SADIE: I have always been obsessed with desserts. All my most vivid memories from childhood surround different treats I ate with loved ones. But back in 2011, when I went gluten-free, there were practically no gluten-free desserts available in stores or restaurants. The few that did exist tasted like sand—overly sweet sand. I realized that if I wanted to still enjoy desserts, I’d have to make them on my own. So I began googling gluten-free recipes for cakes and cookies, and making them myself. I had never been super into baking before, so it was a new hobby for me, and extremely fun. Every day after school I’d run into the kitchen to try a new recipe.
KARIN: What gave you the idea to start a blog?
SADIE: After making other people’s recipes for a while, I wanted to start getting creative and making up my own recipes. So I began concocting my own treats and experimenting with flavors and textures. I shared the desserts with my friends and family, and they all loved them. People were so surprised that they were grain-free, gluten-free, and low-sugar. A lot of other young women and mothers I know had started going gluten-free around the same time, and they kept asking me for the recipes for my desserts. So during the summer before seventh grade, I started a little blogspot.com website where I wrote down my recipes. My mom took all the photos of the food, and it was a super fun creative process.
KARIN: It looks like you eventually moved your blog over to Instagram. Is that where you spend most of your time now?
SADIE: I started an Instagram account shortly after starting the blog—or, I should say, my brother started it. I was too young to have a phone yet, so my older brother would take my latest recipe from the blog and post it on Instagram for me. A few years later, when I got a phone, I started sharing on there more often than my website because it allowed me to connect with people directly, share other bits of my life, and also talk about things other than recipes—like self love, movement, confidence.
KARIN: At what point did you realize you wanted to publish a book, and how did you attract a publisher?
SADIE: I have wanted to write a book since I first started reading as a kid. I have always been transfixed by books—the discovery, the feeling of them in my hands, the process of reading. But the idea for this book started blossoming when I was about fourteen. I started thinking about the ways that food intersect with teen issues and empowerment, and I was inspired to write a book that encompassed all of that—all of our whole selves.
I started writing a book proposal in my freshman year of high school. And then one day, through a common friend, I was introduced to a literary agent. We signed shortly thereafter, and then the agent spent the next year working with me to hone the concept of the book and round out the proposal. The book has evolved so much since then, but it still had the same foundation as it does now. I signed with Sounds True in February 2019, so exactly two years ago!
KARIN: Why did you choose to focus on desserts? Do you imagine that will remain your specialty?
SADIE: I will always be most in love with desserts. To me, making ourselves desserts and enjoying them—especially as young women—is powerful. As teen girls, we’re so conditioned to view desserts as sinful and dangerous, so I think it’s like a small act of rebellion to relish desserts on a daily basis. Another reason I’m drawn to desserts over savory foods is that they’re purely for fun. We don’t need desserts to survive, but they make life more enjoyable. So baking for ourselves is doing a really sweet act of self-care.
KARIN: Did the original concept for the book include teen empowerment? What does that mean to you and how do you incorporate it in the book?
SADIE: I was always drawn to two things: empowering teen girls, and desserts—but it took me several years to fully make the connection between the two. I’m so glad I finally did! Whole Girl was actually born out of my realization that making & eating desserts is a form of empowerment, and flows beautifully from the concept of embracing our whole selves, which is the crux of the book.
KARIN: Tell us more about the Sounds True book publishing arm. What kind of things do they publish?
SADIE: Sounds True focuses on spirituality and wellness books, so they publish a lot of books on mindfulness, meditation, and yoga. I’m honored that Whole Girl is their first YA title, because they really stuck their neck out by publishing something so different.
KARIN: How do you decide how much to share via social media versus what to reserve for your books?
SADIE: Oof, this is always tricky. It kills me to be working on a really fun, delicious recipe that I’m excited about, and not be able to share it. Whole Girl has 45 recipes, and originally had 60, so I spent a lot of time over the past 3 years creating new recipes—none of which I could share yet. It’s challenging to work behind the scenes doing something for years, and not be able to share it (or even about it).
In this era of social media and instancy, there is a lot of pressure to constantly pump out “content” and give your followers a stream of recipes every day (all for free). So while I was writing the book, I would constantly beat myself up for not simultaneously publishing more recipes on my blog and Instagram. I had to remind myself that the hard work I was putting into the book was valid, and it was worth it—even if I had nothing to show yet. This long book-creating process taught me to appreciate things taking a long time to come to fruition! The best things take time.
KARIN: I love all the videos you make! What is the set up you use? Do you also do the editing?
SADIE: I mean, if you’re talking about the Whole Girl trailer, my filmmaker brother made that! But everything else, I make on my own using my iPhone and extremely limited Final Cut skills. Oh, and the window in my kitchen.
KARIN: Where do you go from here? What do you envision?
SADIE: I have so many ideas swirling through my mind about the future! My current endeavor is learning about global issues by majoring in Global Studies at UC Berkeley (alas, remotely for now). But after college, I’m not sure what awaits. I want to explore food justice, regeneration, and policy on a global scale, but I don’t know how to label that profession yet. So I’m trying to take a page from my own book (page 70 in the chapter “Be Unsure,” to be exact) and be okay with not knowing yet what I want to do.
Buy the book!
To learn more about Sadie Radinsky, visit her site.
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