Gisele Bundchen talks about healthy eating and unhealthy relationships | Lifestyle

“I had never felt so depressed and vulnerable,” said Bündchen, now 43. She was unable to lift her own belongings or pick up her two young children, Benjamin and Vivian. “She was in pain when she sat down,” she said.

Currently, she sat wearing faded Levi’s and a white waffle knit shirt. She was so casual that people might have mistaken her for the cutest mother when she picked her up from school. But when the sun shone through and her gaze narrowed, it focused on the face of the woman who sold millions of Victoria’s Secret bras.

Bündchen winced as she recalled the months spent in and out of operating rooms. It’s been a tough few years. She currently lives in Miami, leaving the frigid winters of Massachusetts for the warm climate of Florida, with easy access to her native Brazil. The move was documented on ESPN as well as Instagram gossip account Deuxmoi.

Bottom line: Brady traded his favorite game and the New England Patriots to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, then retired and retired in quick succession. (He lasted three seasons.) Fan accounts speculated that Bundchen might be upset about the sudden move. Reddit warriors accused her of putting a damper on his triumphant comeback. Within months of the move, the two released nearly identical statements announcing their divorce.

Paparazzi recently spotted Bündchen on a date with jiu-jitsu trainer Joaquin Valente. Since their breakup, Brady has faced accusations from her that she has been photographed with other women while Bundchen has been with impunity. Rumor has it that her relationship with Valente predated her divorce.

“I don’t want my life to be in the tabloids,” she said. “I don’t want to open myself up to all of that.” But the story also seemed darker and more familiar to her. The unfaithful wife metaphor is as old as time. She refuted her accusation that she had cheated, saying in no uncertain terms: “That’s a lie.”

“This is what happens to many women who find the courage to leave an unhealthy relationship and are labeled unfaithful,” Bundchen said. “They have to face their community. They have to face their families. Of course, in my case it just happened to be amplified a little bit.”

Bündchen avoided details of her previous relationship to make a broader point. “No one knows what will happen between two people. Only the two people involved know,” she says. She said it has been almost 18 months since her divorce. Meanwhile, Brady appeared to be making progress. Now she does too.

Yes, she admitted, she’s dating someone and it’s new and she’s protective. “This is the first time I’m meeting someone who was her friend,” she said. “It’s very different. It’s very honest and very transparent.”

Before her surgery, Bundchen vowed to change her health. Long before most people in America realized that juice could be a verb, Ms. Bündchen drank her vegetables. She’s so into working out that she’s built a pickleball court and a yoga pavilion in her Costa Rican seaside retreat. Now she is concentrating on her own strength.

When movers came to pack the house she shared with Brady, she used her newfound strength to lift boxes and unpack furniture. She carried the table to the truck. “Those people! I looked at their faces and they were like, ‘You’re crazy,'” she said.

Her twin sister, Patricia, proved Bundchen’s dexterity and tenacity. “She has the ability to drive nails, tighten screws, file and repair anything,” she wrote in her email. “She really gets her hands dirty.”

This month, Bündchen will release her first cookbook, “Nutrition: Simple Recipes to Power Your Body and Nourish Your Mind,” which includes 100 recipes. is a fresh summer roll with cashew dipping sauce that she served as an afternoon lunch. of this interview. She certainly got her hands dirty, folding wet rice paper over a pile of vegetable matches. She was working in a white-board kitchen island in the center of a modest Miami home she purchased in 2022.

She loves the intimacy of this home. As she washed her hands in the sink, Bundchen gestured to her children’s bedroom door. “When I’m like, ‘Benny, Bibi, dinner!’ I’m like, ‘You hear me,'” she said. “I’m sure you can hear me.”

She cut her staff massively. She makes breakfast and picks up the kids from after-school sports. Housework became the focus. “When you come here, you can be alone with them,” she said. She then added: “They have to help me, so I tell them that. I say, ‘Listen, I know the chef was working with us, but mommy is going to do this right now. We’re choosing to do it in a way.”

After the divorce, the arrangement was made so that the children would not be around all the time. But then she realized the benefits of raising a child alone. “They can have this house that has everything I think they need. They’re going to learn a simpler way of living,” she said.

I feel that the scale is close to the environment in which she grew up. Bündchen is one of her six sisters born in the small town of Horizontina. Both of her parents worked, and her mother did all the household chores in addition to her job as a bank teller. When Ms. Bündchen’s children neglect to put her clothes in the basket, she recalls her mother boiling water in a bucket and scrubbing her daughters’ dirty socks.

A month before this interview, her mother passed away from cancer at the age of 75. When the conversation turned to loss, Ms. Bündchen cried. They weren’t delicate tears, they were real, sobs. “It’s just so graphic,” she said. “Her mother is a superwoman to me. She’s a warrior.”

“She was strict,” Bundchen added. “She was a woman of few words, but whenever she had something to say, people listened to her.” Bündchen moved to Japan at age 14, and then she moved to New York. She remains convinced that at least part of the reason she didn’t get into any real trouble was because she told herself, “Her mother wouldn’t approve of this.”

Photographer Nino Muñoz, who has been friends with Bündchen for decades, remembered the model as being preternaturally organized, even as a teenager. “I was always very impressed with her very down-to-earth demeanor. She made sure she was never late for work and went to bed early enough so that she could sleep and be ready for the next morning.” he said. “I think she was filming every day back then.”

There were no drugs, no wild nights, but Bündchen struggled. In her 2018 published memoir Lessons, she detailed panic attacks and severe depression in her 20s. Her meditation, exercise, breathing exercises and changing her diet kept her grounded. “I had a habit that would kill me if I kept it,” she said. “I was taking in all the caffeine, alcohol, and cigarettes, I couldn’t sleep at all, I was working non-stop, and I felt like I had to keep going.”

She met Brady in 2006, a year after breaking up with actor Leonardo DiCaprio. She and Brady married in 2009 and gave birth to Benjamin the same year. (Brady has a son, Jack, with actress Bridget Moynahan, whom Bündchen calls his “bonus child.”) She was 26, but she had been working for more than a decade. . She was ready to welcome her family.

Bündchen made the conscious choice to step back from work in 2015, announcing that she was leaving the runway behind. Still, she made millions of dollars partnering with designers like Chanel and brands like Pantene. Since her divorce, she has worked with many other fashion labels, including Louis Vuitton, Alaïa, Balmain, and Frame. Next year, she will celebrate her 30th year working in the industry. Although she has insisted that she will not retire, she intends to mark the milestone that marks the end of this phase of her career.

“I think it’s a good time to have a bit of a break and start a new season,” she said.

Whatever happens next, she doesn’t mind making it look easy. Ms. Bündchen was quick to point out that she hired someone to help her perfect and test the recipes for “Nourish.” “It’s like, ‘Put a little bit of this in, a little bit of that,'” she said of recipe creation.

With her temperament in mind, nearly every recipe in this book has an improvised twist for parents who cook just like her, and for parents whose children have tastes like hers. It contains. “One day they like carrots, the next day they hate carrots,” she said, nodding towards the summer rolls.

She responds to complaints about vegetables. But you only have so much time to prepare your food for the world outside the kitchen, where mistakes are inevitable.

“Even when you think you know something, you realize you don’t,” she says. “Even if you think you’re judging others, it’s not what you think.”

She has overcome her own disappointments. She wants her own children to learn it too.

“We can’t live our lives wrapped in bubble wrap,” she said. This from a woman who can put her own detractors in a headlock. She’s not as fragile as I thought.