As a supermodel and veteran Victoria’s Secret Angel, there has always been a lot of interest in how Gisele Bündchen keeps fit.
Of course, genetics play a huge role in any person’s body composition. In fact, when she released her autobiography Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life in late 2018, Gisele Bündchen made an unexpected admission—that she hadn’t always been the health-conscious woman you see today.
While she lives a remarkably clean life nowadays, she opened up about her unhealthy diet during the early days of her career, which comprised of cheeseburgers, cigarettes and plenty of iced coffee.
Nowadays, Bündchen has two children with her ex-husband, NFL quarterback Tom Brady, and is arguably one of the healthiest models in the business. She incorporates a nourishing and wholesome diet with an affinity for all kinds of different workouts—resulting in the natural, healthy glow she often shares with her 15+ million Instagram followers.
In fact, she credits her diet turnaround to helping her recover from severe depression and panic attacks in her early 20s.
For all the inspiration you need, scroll down for Gisele Bündchen’s entire diet and exercise routine, including even the smallest health tidbits she lives by.
What Is Gisele Bündchen’s Diet?
In her book Lessons, Bündchen revealed that the earliest days of her modelling career involved a dependence on cigarettes, cheeseburgers, coffee, and alcohol (occasionally drinking a whole bottle of wine in a night).
Though she’s metabolically blessed, the catalyst for change became her mental health, and the supermodel switched to a more wholesome diet to combat her anxiety. In her words: “I don’t call my nutritional regimen a diet, but rather healthy eating habits, so I can maintain a high level of vitality and the mental clarity to have a productive and enjoyable life.”
Bündchen’s diet is plant-based, involving minimal meat and dairy products and a focus on natural, satiating foods.
In her book, she admitted that she intermittently fasts until lunchtime two days of the week, as the body takes a long time to digest foods. She also drinks a morning juice, which usually includes a mix of fresh fruits and vegetables, turmeric, ginger, and coconut milk.
In a recent WSJ interview she added that she likes to wake up with “lukewarm water with a little lemon and Celtic salt.” She will also indulge in some eggs for breakfast or even a smoothie.
She also said that she has just one “poison” ingredient that she never eats: white sugar.
Bündchen usually ingests a wholefood-laden salad for lunch, or a hearty soup with vegetables. She eats meat and fish, but not often, and eats plant based almost all the time.
Bündchen Correlates Food & Her Mental Health
While Bündchen has been pretty open about her journey with food, she later correlated her diet changes with improving her mental health.
“I had no idea it was correlated with my lifestyle, and food was a big part of it,” she said on The View. “I wasn’t really paying attention. I was just going 100 miles an hour.”
A naturopath helped her to realign her approach. “He said to me, ‘Gisele, we have to change your diet’…And I was like, ‘Diet? What does that have to do with panic attacks?’ And he’s like, ‘No, it has everything to do with it.’”
Since this revelation, the “Nourish” cookbook author, who was drinking coffee, smoking and “eating terrible all day” at the time, realized her lifestyle was “destroying [her] health and creating the condition [she] was in.”
“Everything changed,” she said. “I became a different person. I started practicing meditation. I started practicing yoga. I started practicing breath work. It was a long journey.”
She added, “Food, for me, is medicine.”
What Is Gisele Bündchen’s Exercise Routine?
Like many models, Bündchen implores the power of yoga to attain a healthier physique and better mindset.
In her 2019 book Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life, the supermodel wrote that she gravitates toward yoga and pilates as a supercharged workout. She wrote: “[Yoga is] so serene that I can be in a state of meditation while I practice … Whether it involves music or mantras or breath work or meditation, [yoga is] a powerful beautiful spiritual practice. Yoga gave me back my life.”
Bündchen has even shared videos of herself practicing yoga with her children and husband on her Instagram account.
She told WSJ, “I love Pilates because I had back surgery three years ago and it helps with your core.
“I like exercise outside: surfing, swimming, horseback riding, volleyball. When I’m on holiday, I do more of that.”
Bündchen’s other workouts are intense, and her routine includes a serious affinity for boxing.
Considering other supermodels like Gigi Hadid and Josephine Skriver, as well as actress Halle Berry, regularly box for increased cardiovascular strength, it’s little surprise that Bündchen is a fan of high-intensity training.
On Instagram in 2016, she revealed that MMA training (which includes a combination of kickboxing and regular boxing) acts as an effective stress release during her workouts.
What Is Gisele Bündchen’s Wellness Routine?
Meditation has been scientifically proven to reduce stress and provoke a healthier lifestyle, something Bündchen eventually learned in her own time.
The model revealed just how important meditation was to reducing her anxiety and promoting her wellbeing, after she suffered from intense panic attacks early in her career—which weren’t aided by her dependence on caffeine.
Bündchen told CNN journalist Anderson Cooper in 2018 that after meditating, she was “able to kind of step back, almost like I was able to watch my life as a movie. By taking a step back, I was able to remove myself from that anxiety and that feeling of not being able to catch my breath and feeling like I was going to pass out”.
Bündchen also loves surfing, among other watersports. She frequents balmy beach locations (i.e. Costa Rica and California), where the supermodel is able to indulge in her love of the sport. She has also spoken about her affinity for the Brazilian martial art Capoeira.
She told E! News in a 2016 interview: “I surf, I horseback ride, so I think I just really enjoy moving my body. It makes me feel good, and I make it a priority to do that every day, [when] it’s the time of day for myself.
“I think it makes me a better and more patient person overall.”
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