Dirty Whorelebrity News

Alicia Silverstone launched her vegan book “The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet” last night in New York City.

Alicia spoke to TreeHugger.com about her environmental activities and her unique brand of diet advice.

When did you start getting involved in eco-consciousness and how important do you think these kinds of changes are for you and for the planet?

I’d say it started hard-core about 11 years ago. It started with my love of animals–that was my entry point. Then I started to learn more and I found that the same things that were good for animals were also good for me–and the planet! That was so amazing to me.

Everyone deserves and needs clean water and air and food but not everybody has that. That is the core of what’s driving me. I started caring about animals–I still do–but there are many different reasons to care about what happening. We don’t have clean air and we definitely don’t have clean food. You have to have these crazy filters to get clean water. It’s a big problem, and we have to get to the root of it.

The Kind Diet is so amazing–such an intuitive and wise way of looking at food, health and fitness. Can you tell me how it came about?

I’d been squirreling away ideas for a book for a very long time. For eight years! I had a whole file, it was just called “book.” All my recipes and my ideas and thoughts–any time I found something interesting I’d write it down. I just kept collecting. But actually writing a book seemed like such an epic idea–I just couldn’t conceive of how I would do it. Plus, I was busy doing a lot of other projects.

But enough people kept nagging me. I counsel and help a lot of friends, a lot of people who are constipated. There are so many people out there that don’t poo. Some people can’t go for 10 days and that was normal for them! That’s totally unacceptable. You should be pooing at least once a day.

So I’d give them my program and it would work perfectly. There was a woman with ovarian cysts. A friend of mine had high cholesterol. One friend who lost 30 pounds–he couldn’t believe he’d been eating that way before.

I was seeing all these people flower and blossom! But it was taking so much energy to do these little independent books for everyone, I thought, “I might as well do one.”

In edition to her healthy book, Alicia is launching a new site called TheKindLife.com. She recently revealed her plans for the site:

“I created a website called TheKindLife.com to get people hooked on all my groovy latest finds—that will happen around the time of the book. I love Tammy Fender and Suki—those are my favorite skin care lines. Josie Maran lip gloss and eyeshadows [link]. Kiss My Face and Giovanni for shampoo. Desert Essence for conditioner—it smells so yummy! And Pharmacopia moisturizer. It’s all organic, except for a teeny bit of parabens. That’s my one naughty treat. I buy it like once a year. It’s smells so yummy! We have to all write to them so they’ll take the parabens out. I love Melissa [Plastic Dreams] shoes. And Stella McCartney. Melissa makes these two shoes that are so great. They’re these black slightly raised flats with an open toe. And a spider web gold shoe that is so awesome.”