Ever since I watched Howard Stern’s autobiographical film, Private Parts, I’ve held a soft spot for Robin Quivers. She’s Howard’s long-running (and perhaps long-suffering) news anchor, and they’ve been working together since 1981. Of course this means that Robin is the longest-running (non-familial) female presence in Howard’s life, and she keeps him in line as much as possible. You know how that goes with Howard.

Robin is currently speaking out about her recent return to the airwaves after undergoing cancer treatment. Part of this tour involves some unavoidable promotion fo her 2012 book, The Vegucation of Robin, which detailed her switch to a vegan diet. Robin now credits her newfound vegan ways with helping her get through chemo and radiation intact. Her statements could be considered a bit controversial, but I’ll let you decide:

After a scary year or so, Robin Quivers is happily cancer-free, and back in the studio with Howard Stern as his radio sidekick. But as she told TODAY’s Matt Lauer Thursday, she credits the healthy lifestyle she’d been adhering to since just after Sept. 11, 2001, as what got her on the road to recovery faster.

After 9/11, she said, “I thought I would be one of the people who couldn’t help myself out of that (World Trade Center) building. If I was there, someone would have to help me. I’d be one of those people you had to come and get. And I thought, this is not any way to live and I need to figure out what’s wrong.”

What she figured out, and how she feels it helped her body to be strong when the cancer hit her in 2012, has been detailed in her book, The Vegucation of Robin: How Real Food Saved My Life. (Read an excerpt here.) The book, which is available in stores now, is not a diet book or a cookbook, but it explains her journey from that revelation to getting her daily nutrition on track.

“When you consider that I went through chemo and radiation and hardly had any side effects – I saw other people and they were going through the same thing I was, my situation wasn’t complicated by other illnesses, other medications,” she said. “Basically I was strong going in.”

Quivers announced on Stern’s show in June 2012 that she had undergone surgery to remove a growth in her pelvic area. On Sept. 9 of this year, she spoke about the cancer battle, which had occurred in her uterine tissue. She continued to broadcast from her home during recovery, and is now back at work in person.

Stern’s support in her time of need was invaluable; Quivers called him “my heart.”

“I feel fantastic,” she said. “I’ve been declared cancer-free for about three or four months now. It’s just a matter of still recovering at home, past all that treatment that kept me out of the studio for this long. But I’ve been feeling really good.”

[From Today]

Hmm. I’m not going to knock Robin at all for her belief that a vegan lifestyle is what helped ease her way through chemo and radation therapy. I think it was a factor, and a vegan diet is usually a pretty healthy diet. That’s not always the case. I’ve been vegetarian for 20 years, and I can attest to having a number of years where Pringles formed the staple of my diet. I imagine veganism has its own pitfalls as well. The key is treating a diet as a means of achieving a healthy lifestyle, and I think that can be done while eating meat as well as excluding it.

Diet, exercise, hydration, and all sorts of things can be rolled into one holistic treatment plan. It sounds like Robin managed to do just that, and I am thrilled that she has defeated cancer.

Photos courtesy of WENN