Note: If you subscribe in iTunes and Stitcher, you may have to delete the Blissful Bites Podcast + resubscribe. There was an issue with the feed. You can also re-search the podcast and directly download it from there.
Amie Valpone is the author of the best-selling cookbook ‘Eating Clean: The 21-day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation and Reset Your Body and Editor-in-Chief of thehealthyapple.com she is a Manhattan Celebrity chef, culinary nutritionist, professional recipe developer, writer and motivational speaker specializing in simple, gluten-free, soy-free and dairy-free clean eating recipes.
How @thehealthyapple got healthy + wrote a cookbook #blissfulbitespodcast
Click To Tweet
In this episode you’ll learn:
How Amie left her full time corporate job at Vogue
Her process of writing a cookbook
How to get started eating healthy and treating yourself right
Tell us a little bit about you and what you do.
I healed myself from 10 years of chronic illness and I was given 24 hours to live about 6 years ago and I said to myself, “If I survive, if I make it, I’ll dedicate the rest of my life to helping other people get better without pharmaceutical drugs and running around to a million doctors. I, myself, saw over 500 doctors in 10 years so I had to figure out how to really get healthy and to be well because everyone was telling me conflicting information and it was incredibly confusing and exhausting and so that’s really how it all started. Now I am healed. I just wrote my cookbook that came out in my March and I am a celebrity chef, nutritionist and I do a lot of public speaking and media work. It’s a little bit of everything a lot of recipe development and food photography, working with different celebrities, other people here in Manhattan and it’s fun. I love it.
How did you finally get to that place where you can say, “I’m healed.”
That took a really, really long time. I took a good 8 years to figure all these out. It was unbelievable. I tried everything. I tried cutting out every different kind of food, in through my book I took people through a 21-day elimination plan and that’s really what I had to do. I have to prepare my body and kind of do this whole elimination section to really see what was going on inside my body, what was I reacting to but then I also had to keep working with these doctors because I have heavy metal, I have lyme disease, I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, I had so many different things and everything that you see is so conflicting about all of these things. It’s really, really hard to figure out what to do.
Can you share about the process of starting your book?
It takes about 3 years. I wrote the proposal about 3 years ago and so you read the proposal and you send it to your agent and your agent pretty much takes it and then goes ahead and puts it into a nice format.
The proposal itself is about a hundred pages and then you take it and she goes to all the publishing houses and pitches it and then when you get a deal which I got exactly 2 years ago and a month ago and then they just say, “Your deadline is in 9 months. Go.” And that’s it. You have no other guidelines at all. It’s kind of crazy.
Then you just have to figure everything out. Figuring out how to do the recipe testing, I hired some recipe testers, I would create some recipes and then there’s over 200 recipes in my book so I had to hire people help me just test to make sure they work for them. There’s just so many different parts of it and then I wrote how to detox your cleaning supplies, your beauty care products, your personal care products, all these different things that I realized your skin is your biggest organ. Everything you put on your skin gets absorbed. It’s not just what your eating so that was really my biggest wake up call.
What would be your absolute proudest moment?
I’ve been floored by the amount of support I’ve gotten on my cookbook ( Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body) and the fact that it still number 1 on Amazon for Vegetarian books.
When did you make that switch and how did you kind of figure it out and find your way?
It took a long time to figure out. Honestly, my best advice is to follow your heart as cheesy that sounds I never did anything to market anything, I never did anything ‘salesy’, I never did anything to grow my list. My goal is to just help people. I never want anyone to go through the hell that I went through for 10 very exhausting, expensive, traumatizing years and I think a lot of people can relate because a lot of women especially are going through health things and a lot of people aren’t getting the answers that they need and it’s really, really sad. I think a lot of people resonate with the fact, people who are authentic.
What is the first step to take for becoming your own health advocate and starting to figure out how to solve your health issues?
My best advice there is to really be your own doctor not to self-diagnose but to really tell yourself, “You’ve got to be in-charge of this.” Get a copy of all your blood work. No one does that anymore and I really feel like that’s just the biggest step understand what your blood work is saying and what’s going on and a lot of people aren’t doing that. I think the best part is to really just make yourself a binder, keep all of your blood work in there, keep notes from every doctor’s appointment and anything that you’re doing, any new supplements, any new baths or detox regimens like the epsom salt baths or the infared sonas and talk about them because a lot of times I would do new things and I would be like I started 2 things at once, what really helped me? I can’t remember if these pains in my knees started before that or after that. All of a sudden my pains and aches started going away and I was like this is kind of crazy.
Can you share something that was a flop or a disappointment since you left Vogue and became an entrepreneur?
All the lows came from health issues and so I kept relapsing.
What is your biggest piece of advice to someone who is just getting started?
My biggest piece of advice is to stick to one ingredient in whole foods. Stop eating processed packaged foods that are with an ingredient list that you cannot pronounce and that super long but you don’t even know what’s in it and stick with whole foods like one ingredient foods. You can base your entire day, all your meals and snacks, around these one-ingredient whole foods and that’s really how you’ll train your taste buds to resist these diet cokes or these other foods that we all get hooked on and we train our taste buds to want these fake foods. Your taste buds can unlearn that.
What’s your favorite recipe in your book?
The pialla is really great people love that. They love the chia breakfast pudding but I like a baked pear-blueberry, oatmeal skillet for breakfast. I had breakfast tacos that are awesome. I have some really great pizza crust that are out of this world.
How do you stay balanced?
I’m incredibly balanced. I can honestly say I’m incredibly balanced. I don’t get stressed, I do a lot of meditation, I started doing a lot of energy work and doing a lot of energy work has really helped calm down my parasympathetic nervous system and I don’t let my inbox stress me out. I don’t want people to stress me out. When you go through 10 years of chronic illness nothing phases you. I’ve learned that you have to put yourself first as selfish as that may sound it’s not selfish. You have to take care of your body because if you’re not taking care of it no one else is going to and I think that’s really important especially for women because we’re trying to do so many different things and we really have to focus on our health and put our oxygen mask first and then you put on the oxygen mask for everybody else.
Find Amie!
Buy Amie’s Cookbook: Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body here!
Thehealthyapple.com
Instagram: @thehealthyapple
Twitter: @thehealthyapple
Facebook: The Healthy Apple
Pinterest: The Healthy Apple
Amie Valpone, HHC, AADP is the author of the best-selling cookbook Amie’s first cookbook, Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation & Reset Your Body and the Editor-in-Chief of TheHealthyApple.com; she is a Manhattan Celebrity Chef, Culinary Nutritionist, Professional Recipe Developer, Food Photographer, Writer and Motivational Speaker specializing in simple gluten-free, soy-free and dairy-free ‘Clean Eating’ recipes. Amie recently healed herself from a decade of chronic pain including Lyme Disease, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, Hypothyroidism, Adrenal Fatigue, Leaky Gut, Heavy Metals and much more exhausting thousands of doctors in the country and Mayo Clinic; she shares her story of how Clean Eating and Detox saved her life and inspires you to Clean up your food, too. Amie lives in Manhattan, NYC where she cooks for a variety of clients including celebrities and people with busy lifestyles who enjoy healthy, organic, whole foods. Amie’s work appears on Martha Stewart, ABC News, Fox News Health, WebMD, The Huffington Post, The Food Network, Glamour Magazine, Clean Eating Magazine, SELF Magazine, Prevention Magazine, PBS and many others.
Blissful Bites Sponsor: Kit Life! Get 10% off your planner with code GRANOLA at checkout!
Enter the podcast giveaway! This months giveaway is HUGE. Granola from Blissful Eats, A Love Drop from Love Grown Foods, a smoothie box from Green Blender, one bag of Otto’s Cassava Flour and bagels from Sweet Note Bakery by filling out the form below AND/OR writing an iTunes review and sending a screen shot of it in an email to me!
The post How Amie Valpone Took Charge of Her Health + Wrote a Cookbook appeared first on Nicole Culver.