Amie Valpone shares how she fought her way to better health in her new book, which includes a 21-day detox plan
Eating clean: it's all the rage. Amie Valpone should know -- she serves as a personal healthy recipe guru for celebrities and high-profile clients in Manhattan. But when she uses the term, she doesn't just mean dropping processed foods to shed a few extra pounds.
When Valpone, 33, first set out to "detox" her own diet, she didn't just want to eat healthier. She wanted to save her life.
(Lauren Volo/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)In the introduction to her new cookbook, "Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body" (March 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Valpone, a Monmouth County native, describes being hospitalized for C. difficile colitis, a stomach condition in which a harmful bacteria colonizes the gut and causes inflammation. She puts the severity of her condition in the starkest possible terms:
"I was given 24 hours to live."
This may seem like a perfect sound bite for someone telling the story of how they returned from the brink, but for Valpone, it was just the beginning of finding her way back to health. Five days later, after she beat the 24-hour prognosis and her system knocked the infection, she was still fatigued and her legs were extremely swollen and cramped.
Valpone weighed just 98 pounds, had already been misdiagnosed with leukemia and had exhausted a series of appointments with gastroenterologists before she was even diagnosed with the bacterial infection.
She found herself living her days at hospitals and doctor offices, feeling so run down that she had to go on disability from her marketing job in at the NBA.
Growing up in Sea Girt, Valpone, whose aunt and uncle own Front St. Trattoria in Red Bank, says she revered doctors -- "prayed at the altar of conventional medicine," even. Apart from being lactose intolerant, Valpone never had a problem with food or her health.
But in her 20s, her health began to decline in nearly every possible way. Valpone says there was no quick fix, no prescription that alleviated what ailed her without causing more problems. An entire decade of illness and disease followed.
Amie Valpone's bell pepper soup, a recipe from "Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body." (Lauren Volo)No matter how many medical professionals she consulted -- she says she had seen hundreds of doctors, including those at the Mayo Clinic, and gotten hundreds of blood tests -- she couldn't find answers. Slowly, with the help of doctors who practice integrative and functional medicine, approaches focused on the root causes of disease, she began to piece together the puzzle. Heavy metal toxicity, polycystic ovarian syndrome, Lyme disease and candida are among the issues that she says caused her symptoms.
She dismantled her entire diet in favor of a completely revamped attitude to everything she put in, on and near her body -- including food, beauty products and cleaning supplies. The aim: detoxify everything -- whether that meant breakfast, the bathroom or the washing machine.
Amie Valpone. (Anthony Valpone) "Now I feel amazing," she says -- a far cry from that time at the hospital when morphine did little to assuage her stabbing stomach pains.
Today Valpone, who went back to school to get her degree in integrative nutrition, splits her time between New York and Sea Girt. She works as a personal food coach and culinary nutritionist to celebrities and news anchors and blogs recipes at TheHealthyApple.com. She says her Lyme disease is completely gone and other problem areas -- liver enzymes, thyroid, hemoglobin and platelets -- are all back to normal, without the steroids, painkillers and water pills that she says only masked her symptoms.
"Knowing her personally only after years of detoxing and healing, it was hard to even imagine," says Justin Schwartz, Valpone's editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. "But what inspired me even more to acquire the book is that Amie found her own path to health."
In "Eating Clean," Valpone emphasizes that each person should act as a dietary detective to figure out which foods are bugging them through a 21-day food elimination diet. Each potentially offending food is removed and added back in one by one to try to connect symptoms with triggers.
"Amie's guidelines are things anyone can do for themselves, right now," Schwartz says. "You don't need to have a degree in biology to understand it."
The recipes in Valpone's book may have fanciful names -- "Happy Swiss Chard-Wrapped Veggie Burgers" and "Best Friend Bars" among them -- but they address a major dilemma: how to find pleasure in eating clean, especially when that means eating around the so-called "toxic" staples of the American diet.
"It's all about how to create flavor," Valpone says. As a general rule, she does not eat out because of the oils used in many restaurants, but she eschews labels like "vegan" and "paleo," preferring her followers to do what works for them.
"It's really about eating a lot of fresh, whole food," she says. "It's a lot easier than you think."
Valpone's millet breakfast tacos. (Lauren Volo)Valpone's more than 200 detox-friendly recipes are all plant-based and free of the things that Valpone found exacerbated her symptoms -- dairy, soy, eggs and gluten -- despite endoscopies and colonoscopies that argued otherwise -- as well as corn, refined sugar, chemical sugar alternatives and peanuts -- all part of what she calls the "toxic 13."
Mark Hyman, a doctor and practitioner of functional medicine who has authored a number of diet books including "Eat Fat, Get Thin," and "The Blood Sugar Solution," talks about what he calls the "toxic burden" in the foreword to Valpone's book. This can also be important, he says, for those who find it difficult to lose weight.
"Toxins increase your appetite and scramble brain signals that control hunger, slowing down your metabolism and contributing to weight gain and diabetes," he writes.
Valpone's book offers alternatives to common cravings like caffeine (try detox tea instead), eggs (use ground flaxseeds or chia seeds combined with water, which creates a gel when you need a food binder) and wheat and gluten (dump gluten-free flours and breads for naturally gluten-free food).
"It comes down to making swaps," Valpone says.
In addition to her recipes, she gives a playbook for the type of food allergy testing that could help illuminate important problems and sensitivities. She does not claim to offer medical advice -- she pairs her guidelines with the caveat that they should be undertaken with the supervision of a doctor. But she says she bonds with those who find a kindred spirit in someone who had been laughed at by doctors, and sometimes even thought crazy by friends.
"When you're in it, you feel like a victim," she says of chronic illness.
"Now I don't even go to a lot of doctors," she says. "I just do a lot of energy work and acupuncture."
For Valpone, all the medicine she needs is now in her food:
"Once you feel life this way you never go back."
Amie Valpone will be signing books in Manasquan on June 12 and Spring Lake on June 13. For more information, visit thehealthyapple.com
Recipe excerpts from "Eating Clean" by Amie Valpone:
Magical Peach Arugula Salad
Serves 6 to 8.
Here's a dish that provides a big payoff for very little effort. It takes about five minutes to throw this salad together, and the combination of peppers, peaches, and arugula is simply beautiful. Serve it in a wide bowl to show off its good looks.
10 cups arugula
5 medium ripe peaches, pitted and diced
2 yellow or orange bell peppers, diced
1/3 cup finely chopped raw walnuts
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
In a large bowl, combine the arugula, peaches, bell peppers, and walnuts.In a small bowl, whisk together the oil, vinegar, lemon juice, lemon zest, salt, and pepper. Drizzle the dressing over the arugula mixture, toss, and serve.
Sunrise Nori Wraps with Spicy Tahini Drizzle
Serves 4
If you like California rolls, you'll love these nori wraps (though personally, I think they're so much better!).The tahini dressing is truly addictive--you're going to want to dress everything in it--and the cabbage provides a nice crunch. If possible, use a food processor to slice the cabbage so you can get it super thin. Also, make sure the vegetable strips are all the same width and length so that they don't hang over the edges of the nori sheets; this will make rolling up the wraps easier. Use leftover tahini drizzle as a dressing for salads or as a dip for crudites.
Amie Valpone's Sunrise Nori Wraps. (Lauren Volo)
Sunrise Nori Wraps
4 nori seaweed sheets
1/4 small head red cabbage, very thinly sliced
1 large carrot, peeled and julienned
1 small yellow summer squash, julienned
1 small cucumber, julienned
1 large ripe avocado, pitted, peeled, and sliced
1 recipe Spicy Tahini Drizzle
Spicy Tahini Drizzle
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 1/4 tablespoons chickpea miso paste
1 tablespoon raw tahini
2 medjool dates, pitted
1 garlic clove, minced
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
Water, as needed to thin the drizzle
Place the nori sheets on a flat surface. Divide the cabbage, carrot, squash, cucumber, and avocado among the sheets. Top each pile of vegetables with a heaping tablespoon of the Spicy Tahini Drizzle, and then roll up the nori sheets into a tube shape. Make the tahini: Combine all of the ingredients except the water in a blender. Blend, adding water 1teaspoon at a time as you go, until the mixture becomes a thin sauce.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup. Find NJ.com Entertainment on Facebook.