Despite her slender frame, Kelly Ripa insists she eats whatever she wants. The Live With Kelly and Ryan cohost gets an early start each morning (she wakes up at 5 a.m.) and even though she doesn’t start eating until around 10 a.m., she manages to finish her day with an old childhood favorite that she’s grown to love.
The first thing Ripa, 48, does when she rises in the morning is have a cup of bulletproof coffee. For the All My Children alum, the caffeinated beverage consists of the “darkest roast coffee” she can find, mixed with a spoonful of Organic Valley ghee and two shots of espresso. Ripa then blitzes the drink in a blender until frothy. “It fills me up and I feel satiated, so it keeps me from being ravenous during the show,” she told Bon Appétit in an interview published on Tuesday, January 22, noting she doesn’t eat anything before the cameras roll.
“I’ve tried eating once or twice before the show and it’s always been a disaster,” the actress explained. “It’s very, very hard to host a morning show when you’re digesting — my brain almost goes to sleep.”
Once the show is done for the day, Ripa surrounds herself with snacks. “I do enjoy keeping nuts around me at all times, and I don’t just mean the people in my life,” she joked. “I mean almonds and cashews, and I do like dried fruit. I know people will say, ‘Oh, that’s the jellybean of the healthy snack world,’ but for me, dried apricots and cherries are better than candy. I know it has as much sugar, but I just enjoy it.”
The Daytime Emmy winner also has a fondness for peanut butter ThinkThin high protein bars, which she eats despite many nutritionists’ warnings that those bars “are not the best ones.” Explained Ripa: “I like how they taste.”
Continuing the trend of eating “whatever the hell I want,” Ripa typically ends her day with a joint snack with her husband, Mark Consuelos. “Mark and I used to have peanut butter and jelly as a bedtime snack. I’m not sure why. Even as a kid, I didn’t really like it, but now here I am,” she noted. “I get ciabatta bread, and now I eat half a sandwich before bed, with chunky Skippy peanut butter or Justin’s honey peanut butter and Bonne Maman strawberry or raspberry jam.”
Ripa’s fondness for PB&J is well documented – cohost Ryan Seacrest presented her with a massive sandwich-shaped cake in celebration of her birthday in October 2018 – and it’s not something she’s about to apologize for. “Here’s the thing: I’m 48. These are things at 38 I never would have tainted myself with,” she told the magazine. “But at 48, I’m sort of saying, Who cares? Life is short. Eat the peanut butter and jelly.”
