Janet Podleski

A Tale of Two Sisters:

About Janet & Greta Podleski

Two of North America's foremost healthy cooking/healthy eating experts, sisters Janet & Greta Podleski are the authors of four blockbuster #1 bestselling cookbooks: Looneyspoons, Crazy Plates, Eat, Shrink & Be Merry!, and their latest, The Looneyspoons Collection. They're also co-hosts of the popular Food Network Canada TV healthy cooking series, Eat, Shrink & Be Merry! (Think "Extreme Makeover: Recipe Edition!")

Janet & Greta's passion is making healthy eating so delicious and so much fun, people will (almost) get healthy by accident! Since more giggling leads to less jiggling (laughing burns calories!), they spice things up by using cartoons and humor to make the complicated subject of healthy eating "easier to digest."

But it's their food that really takes the cake! We guarantee that once you try their scrumptious recipes, you won't believe they're also good for you. It's all of your favorite comfort foods, only prepared in a way that won't bust your belt buckle. It's great-tasting food that won't go from your lips to your hips!

With the myriad of fad diets out there, people don't have a clue what to eat anymore. And sadly, everyone's eating out of packages, boxes and bags. People have forgotten what "real" food is! It's no wonder that obesity and diabetes are now serious epidemics.

That's where Janet & Greta come in! This fall, with the help of Hay House, they're launching their best book ever, The Looneyspoons Collection, into the US market. Janet & Greta truly believe their book can help Americans to "take platters (and health matters!) into their own hands," to get them back into the kitchen and cooking healthy meals that will make a real difference in their lives.

Janet, the writer/researcher of the duo, is a Registered Holistic Nutritionist, and she's peppered the books' margins with hundreds of valuable and educational "nutrition nuggets" to help change the way people eat. Greta (the cook of the duo) is fondly referred to as "The Rain Man of Healthy Cooking." She's taken everyone's favorite comfort foods and given them a healthy twist - without sacrificing taste!

More about the Podleski Sisters...

Janet & Greta are to Canada what Jamie Oliver is to the UK. They are two of Canada's all-time bestselling authors! Their first cookbook, Looneyspoons (published in 1996) sold an astonishing 850,000 copies. With one-tenth of the US population, that would be like selling 8.5 million copies! The original Looneyspoons spent an incredible 85 weeks on Canada's national bestseller list--8 months in the #1 spot! Making that even more sensational is the fact that these two sisters self-published their book!

Their second cookbook, Crazy Plates, was a finalist for the prestigious James Beard Foundation Cookbook Awards in the "Healthy Focus" category. And their third cookbook, Eat, Shrink & Be Merry!, was named "Cookbook of the Decade 2000-2009" by Chapters/Indigo book chain, outselling Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Rachel Ray, Martha Stewart and others. Combined sales of the four cookbooks now totals over two million copies!

The sister act and their "against-all-odds," inspirational self-publishing success story have been featured in countless newspapers and magazines, and the sisters have been guests on hundreds of TV and radio interviews, including The Today Show with Matt Lauer, CNN, CBS Saturday Morning, Canada AM, NPR and QVC. Much to their dismay, Janet & Greta never managed to get on Oprah, but they once camped for hours outside her Chicago apartment building hoping for a chance to meet her. Hey, it was worth a try! (Darn security officers!)

Over the past 15 years, the dynamic duo has also found time to develop a line of healthy prepared foods (including gourmet, gluten-free chicken burgers), produce monthly columns for Reader's Digest and Taste of Home magazines and create a series of "grEATing" cards for Hallmark. Clearly, the sisters' personal lives border on pathetic.

Janet & Greta both live in Ontario, Canada - Janet, with her beloved Jack Russell Terrier, Lacey Lou, and Greta, with her rambunctious pooch, Rico.

What is The Looneyspoons Collection?

The Looneyspoons Collection (TLC) is a #1 national bestselling, fun-filled guide to healthy eating.

It's good food, good health and good fun...all rolled into one!

TLC is jam-packed with "the best of the best" Janet & Greta recipes...made even better! A whopping 400 pages, 325 "I can't believe these are healthy recipes," over 150 gorgeous full-color food photos, plus hundreds of cutting edge healthy eating and weight loss tips. All of the most popular recipes from the Podleskis' first three books have been revised and updated, and there are almost 100 new recipes, too...

Scrumptious recipes with better carbs, better fats, less sugar, less salt, more fiber, lean protein...PLUS OVER 150 GLUTEN-FREE RECIPES! Now THAT takes the cake!

You'll also find diabetic-friendly recipes, vegan and vegetarian recipes and recipes suitable for weight watchers. (It's the #1 cookbook used by Weight Watchers members in Canada.)

Plus, TLC is loaded with cartoons, humor and funny recipes titles like Lord of the Wings, Tuna Turner, I Got Stew Babe, Ladle Gaga, The Rolling Scones, The Blah-Shank Redemption, Thigh Master, Celine Dijon Chicken and Salmon Cowell.

Thousands upon thousands of fans have written to Janet & Greta saying this is by far their "most-used" cookbook, a family-friendly book that's helping people to feel better, look better and cook better. Finicky kids and meat-and-potato-eating husbands have been requesting recipes from TLC and are gobbling up healthy meals! Hey, what kid wouldn't come running to the table for Jurassic Pork or Darth Tater?

The Looneyspoons Recipe for Success

(How it all Happened)

* Sisters Janet & Greta Podleski literally went for broke to get their first book, Looneyspoons, on store shelves in 1996.

* Their mission? To help North Americans to eat more healthfully--one stomach at a time. Everyone loves to eat and everyone loves to laugh. Why not combine these two elements into a book that can help improve millions of lives?

* Greta is the cook and recipe developer of the duo (she started cooking at age five!) and Janet is the writer/researcher (who later became a Registered Holistic Nutritionist). Both have corny senses of humor.

* One month after dreaming up their idea, they quit their jobs (on the same day!), Greta moved into Janet's basement (a week after her wedding--just in time for the honeymoon!), and they cashed in all of their savings (which wasn't much!).

* To avoid all naysayers, they told no one about their "secret basement project," not even their mother or four older sisters. To motivate themselves, they cut out the newspaper's national bestseller list, whited out the name at the top, and typed in "Looneyspoons, by Janet & Greta Podleski." They stared at it every day!

* The sisters went 14 months without any income while writing the book and amassed $80,000 in personal debt! Janet made mortgage payments with her credit card out of desperation. When bills arrived in the mailbox, the sisters didn't open them. Why bother when you can't pay? They put them in a "bill drawer" and hoped they'd go away!

* To avoid declaring bankruptcy, they hatched a brilliant plan for an "everything but the kitchen sink yard sale." They sold everything in their house that wasn't nailed down. In the heat of the moment, Janet drove her car on the front lawn, tied balloons to it and sold it, too! She also sold her wedding dress. (She tried to give her husband as a gift with purchase, but there were no takers.)

* With $9,000 in profit from the yard sale, they were able to complete their book. The duo then sent their manuscript to all of the largest publishers in NYC, hoping for a dream-come-true contract. Reality set in when all of them flatly turned the girls down. They were first-time authors without a track record and they weren't represented by an agent. Plus, their book and its content and style were so different and non-traditional. The publishers' consensus: "Combining food with humor? It'll never work! Don't quit your day jobs!" (Too late!!)

* Desperate, but undaunted, they decided to self-publish, since they believed so passionately in their book and its message.

* The girls solicited the help of Dave Chilton, author of the two-million-copies-sold bestseller, The Wealthy Barber (a book about personal financial planning). After trying a piece of their famous cherry cheesecake and listening to their marketing presentation, he gave sample pages of the book to his cookbook-loving mother. Two weeks later, she declared, "This is the best food I've ever eaten! You have to help these girls publish this book!" That was enough market research for Dave. He was in! (Incidentally, Dave Chilton is now one of the "Dragons" on the top-rated TV show, "Dragon's Den"--the Canadian version of the US's "Shark Tank.")

* Looneyspoons ended up becoming one of the fastest-selling books in Canadian publishing history, selling an astonishing 850,000 copies--unheard of in the world of self-publishing. It was on the national bestseller list for 85 consecutive weeks--8 months at the #1 spot.

* Ironically, when the book first hit the bestseller list in Canada, the newspaper made a very unusual error in reporting. The book was listed as "Looneyspoons, by John Podleski." John Podleski is the name of Janet & Greta's father who had passed away in 1991 after battling lung cancer. No one at the newspaper could explain the error, and despite correcting it, the name John Podleski appeared on the list for two more weeks!

* Since then, Janet & Greta have self-published three more #1 national bestselling cookbooks! Their publishing company, Granet Publishing Inc. (Greta + Janet = Granet) is wildly successful, having sold more than 2 million cookbooks.

* They host a popular healthy cooking TV show on Food Network Canada, called "Eat, Shrink & Be Merry!"

* They sell a line of healthy food products in Costco warehouses across Canada and in 2001 their frozen meal kits were voted "Best New Grocery Product of the Year" by the Canadian grocery industry.

* The sisters created a unique line of "grEATing" cards that were sold nationally in all Hallmark Canada locations. The humorous cards featured healthy recipes and cartoons.

* Janet & Greta wrote the first-ever food editorial in Reader's Digest history, a monthly column that ran for two years. They even appeared on the cover of Reader's Digest Canada! (They figured being cover girls was better than being centerfolds!)

* Their books and recipes were the subject of Trivial Pursuit questions and the girls' entrepreneurial story is studied in college/university marketing textbooks.

* Janet & Greta have starred in national television commercials, had their soup recipes printed on millions of Nabisco cracker boxes, their recipes featured on cases of Diet Coke, and they licensed their brand for a line of colorful kitchen tools and gadgets that were sold across Canada.

* The sisters have sold all four of their bestselling cookbooks on QVC, the popular shopping network. They once sold a whopping 10,000 copies in just 12 minutes!

* Their latest book, The Looneyspoons Collection has been sitting on top of the Canadian national bestseller list week after week, and is the #1 most-talked-about cookbook on weight-loss forums across the country.

* To date, they've received thousands upon thousands of emails from thankful fans who've written saying they've lost tons of weight and feel great, and who echo the same sentiment: This food is too good to be good for you!

All of this because Janet & Greta passionately believed they could help millions of North Americans to eat more healthfully...and they NEVER gave up trying despite having all the odds stacked against them.