Interview with Amie Valpone | Author of Eating Clean

Amie Valpone, Writer, Culinary Nutritionist and Celebrity Chef, has written a new book ‘Eating Clean: The 21 Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body ’. Eating Clean tells Amie’s story from chronic illness to empowered health. It contains helpful clean eating tips and 200 delicious recipes that are vegetarian and free of gluten, dairy, soy, corn, eggs, and refined sugar. Read this interview to learn more about Conscious Living with Amie Valpone!

What inspired you to write Eating Clean: The 21-Day plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation and Reset your Body?

I want to show you that eating clean and living clean feels amazing. Not because you should do it, but because once you see life this way, you’ll never go back. There’s not an inflammatory white bagel or piece of candy in the world that I’d eat to give up for as good as I feel right now. When you figure out what works for you and makes you feel amazing, why wouldn’t you do that every day? Don’t you do what makes you feel good?

Eating Clean steps the reader through your personal journey from sickness to health. Is there a piece of advice that may empower readers to take a similar journey?

Getting healthy (and staying healthy) may take some serious shifts in your daily habits, but don’t worry about revamping your lifestyle overnight. These changes take time. Start when you feel ready and take a deep breath. My “aha” moment was getting chronically ill, but you don’t need to go through something that dramatic. Funny thing is that before I got sick, I cooked my own meals, brought my lunch to work, and never ate fast food. I thought I was eating healthy, but I had no idea how toxic seemingly healthy food could be. The fact is that nothing changed until I started to change my food, my environment and my lifestyle, which is what is outlined in this book with a huge section on how to detox your food, home, personal care products and beauty products. If more people understood what an important role they plan in their own healthy, they could change the quality of their life forever. I’m living proof.

Your book provides a 21-Day Plan to Detox one’s life from food to personal care to household cleaners. Why do you think this holistic view is important?

I never realized our personal care products (everything from our chapstick to our sunscreen to our body lotion, shampoo and conditioner) were lurking with chemicals and parabens. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? Why wasn’t I taught this growing up? Why wasn’t anyone looking out for me? I was so sad when I discovered this. My parents didn’t even know about this. I had to educate them. Our skin is our biggest organ so anything we put on our skin gets absorbed into our bloodstream- once I cleaned up my personal care products- everything from my deodorant to my makeup- my liver enzymes started to normalize because I was lessening the body burden of toxins that were bombarding my body on a daily basis. It was fascinating.

As a nutritionist what would you recommend as quick and healthy dinner option for those just getting started on a healthier track?

I love the Millet Tacos recipe from my cookbook. It’s my favorite…it’s actually a breakfast recipe in my book but it’s just as good for dinner!

Did you come across any new healthy discoveries while writing Eating Clean?

The importance of balance. I was a work work work kinda-gal for many years and starting my own business I had to learn work life balance and that the most successful people in the world are those who have balance. It’s not about working all day to succeed. It’s about finding a balance that works for you and not worrying about what anyone else is doing. It’s about finding happiness within yourself. That’s what I found through writing this book. This book isn’t about me….it’s about my message to help as many people as I can. I truly hope this book changes lives. I’m ready to hand over the keys to someone else to help them navigate their life so they don’t have go through the suffering, trauma and exhaustion of chronic illness I went through for 10 very painful and expensive years trying to figure out how to be healthy in a real way.