Kelly Ripa, 48, Credits The Alkaline Diet For Her Insane Bikini Body: Here’s How It Works

Kelly Ripa is fiercely fit at 48. So, how does the host of ‘Live With Kelly and Ryan’ manage to look so great — and have so much energy? A celebrity nutritionist explains how diet plays a key role.

Kelly Ripa, 48, is a ray of sunshine every morning on her ABC talk show Live With Kelly and Ryan. And even though she’s up at 5:30am to start her day, she still manages to fit in at least an hour of exercise after work. Her dedication definitely pays off when it comes to her beach body. But seriously, where does she find the energy to do it all? Is she Superwoman? Or is she just super healthy? Probably a little of both.

We do know that Kelly mostly follows the alkaline diet. She has spoken openly about it on her talk show and has said she found the diet when searching for help with unexplained joint pain. Her hunt led her to Dr. Daryl Gioffre, celebrity nutritionist and author of Get Off Your Acid. Kelly started eating the alkaline way and found it so helpful that she changed her lifestyle – and even wrote the forward to the book.

The alkaline diet sounds pretty scientific — but when it’s broken down it’s very simple. The key is upping your intake of veggies and cutting out acid forming foods like sugar and red meat. “There are foods that create health in the body and there are foods that create toxins in the body,” explains Dr. Gioffre. “What you want to do is you want to remove the things that are acidic. So, sugar, grains, artificial sweeteners, too much meat or animal-based proteins and dairy. And we focus on getting the alkaline foods into the diet, so your green leafy vegetables, your spinach, your kale, your watercress, your romaine lettuce. Your cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli and cauliflower. Your sulfur-based vegetables which is like onions and radishes and cabbages.”

No big surprise that veggies are good for you, but did you know carbonated water is totally toxic for your body? According to Dr. Gioffre it’s something that Kelly was drinking daily until she realized how much it was hurting her body. “Kelly, went to a bunch of different doctors she was having pain in her elbows and joints, she talked about this in the forward of the book, and one of the big ones was carbonated water. How many people think that carbonated water is  healthy for you? Carbonated water is infused with carbon dioxide gas, which is one of the most acidic chemicals in the body that is why breathing is so important because it’s about getting in the oxygen but more importantly it’s about getting out the carbon dioxide gas. Kelly was drinking carbonated water every single day and then wondering why her joints were so painful, and the crazy thing was after three days of being on my program she was symptom-free, and this was after dealing with these symptoms for over 12 months.”

Although the alkaline diet isn’t focused on weight loss, it’s a side effect of getting healthy and according to Dr. Gioffre it’s common for his patients to quickly lose weight eating this way. He even dropped 50 pounds himself once he went alkaline. “If you’re overweight it’s an acid problem. What happens is that when you are eating all these acidic foods, the body is becoming overly acidic so the body needs to do whatever it can to stabilize its PH. And what it does is it holds onto fat as a buffer to neutralize the acid.  When your body has the energy, or the right nutrients to dump them out, it does.

:Once you start putting minerals into your body, in the forms of these nutrient rich foods, like wheat grass juice and celery juice and all the ones I mentioned before like avocados and the dark green leafy vegetables, the minerals latch onto the toxins and they expel them out of the body. The fat cell is attached to the toxin, so what happens is the fat ends up leaving the body as a byproduct of detoxification, it’s effortless.” Have more energy, avoid disease — and look better at the beach? Pass the broccoli please.