The secret behind Beyonce’s bootylicious bounceback
The superstar credits nutritionist Marco Borges for her speedy weight loss after giving birth to twins... and you don’t need to be an A-list mum to benefit
Earlier this summer, pop queen Beyoncé posted a new video to social media with footage from rehearsals for her celebrated 2018 appearance at the music festival Coachella, the american equivalent of Glastonbury.
it was less than a year since she’d given birth to twins rumi and Sir, and she needed to get back into those trademark sequins in time for the gig. We see her famous feet approach the scales — ‘every woman’s nightmare’ she whispers, stepping on — before revealing a weight of 175lb, or 12st 7lb. ‘long way to go,’ she mutters. ‘let’s get it.’
Cut to the man she turns to — Marco Borges, ‘exercise physiologist’ and nutritionist to the stars, who in 2013 put Queen Bey and husband Jay-Z on a radical vegan diet and has ever since been on speed dial chez Knowles-Carter.
in the video, we see him personally overseeing Beyoncé’s diet and exercise regime, and almost before you can whip up an almond-milk smoothie and top it with broccoli, she’s back on stage looking fab in sparkly lycra.
it is, of course, the best advert for Borges’ methods you could possibly have crafted, with more than 19 million people viewing the video within 24 hours of its posting.
it is clearly no coincidence that Borges has a book to sell — Greenprint, which describes in detail the ‘22 laws’ behind his manifesto for plant-based living, the ‘22 Day Nutrition Plan’, a figure chosen because apparently it takes 21 days to break bad habits and form better ones.
BeyoNCé followed the diet for 44 days, in fact. (She and Jay-Z are not just pals of Borges, by the way; they’re business partners in a venture that’s just expanded to include a $99-a-year subscription service selling personalised meal planners and online advice from ‘food coaches’.)
yet the backlash was swift, with some accusing Beyoncé of ‘body shaming’ women who weigh more than 12 st 7lb.
others wondered aloud whether Borges’ diet and lifestyle plan, which involves no bread, no carbs, sugar, dairy, meat, fish or alcohol and is also followed by actress Jennifer lopez and singer Pharrell Williams, was too restrictive for mere mortals without personal chefs.
Dieticians, meanwhile, questioned the low calorie count — 1,400 a day, according to the
British association for Nutrition and lifestyle Medicine. (The NHS recommends 2,500 calories a day for men and 2,000 for women.)
is it really healthy only ever to eat plants? Not even honey, since, like cow’s milk, that breaks one of Borges’ cardinal rules: don’t eat any product from a thing ‘with a face’.
on the phone from Miami, where he grew up and still lives, Borges is every inch the exceptionally honed evangelist for all things very vegan indeed.
‘i met Beyoncé when Jay-Z was coming out of retirement and she was preparing for an album, and we decided to work together for a couple of weeks and that turned into a beautiful friendship,’ he fizzes. ‘i count her literally as my sister and him as my brother.
‘She lives to empower people and lift them with kindness. She’s a beautiful soul, and i have to say an absolute perfectionist, too. The reality is we’ve had this obsession with animal protein for decades. We’ve gone through endless fad diets, and yet people are still dying from lifestyle illnesses like heart disease and diabetes, which are absolutely about diet.
‘The definition of madness is to know something is killing us but to do it anyway. These are diseases we could definitely prevent and even reverse if we modified our behaviour.
‘The more you move towards a plantbased diet, the more fibre you consume, the more you reduce your intake of saturated fats, the more you lose weight, increase energy, and mitigate the damage done by this reliance on meat.’
Borges grew up one of three children to a single mum of Cuban origin. ‘We were very poor and we struggled a lot. Sometimes it was a choice between food and electricity,’ he says. Meat was key to their diet, but watching his sickly elder relatives pop daily pills to combat high blood pressure or cholesterol, the young Borges began to question everything he knew about food. an obsession with nutrition was born. How does he react to accusations of fat-shaming in the wake of that video? is 12st 7lb really too big? ‘[Beyoncé] was having a candid conversation on camera,’ he says. ‘Do you know of a woman who doesn’t dread getting on the scales? We need to have a dialogue about this. ‘of course people have had enough of watching other people getting abused or put down because of how they look on the outside — and that’s wrong on all levels. But that should not be interpreted as closing down all conversations about fat and health. Just talking about it is not fat-shaming. it’s not body-shaming.
‘obesity kills people, and we’re supposed to stand by and say nothing? it increases your risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and we’re not allowed to talk about it?
‘When i first told my own mother that i was going to follow a plantonly diet, she said i was crazy. i’m not going to be offended by people i’ve never met, when my own mother told me i was wrong.’
Borges’ veganism is a business, but it’s also fashionably activist in spirit. it is a rallying cry against corporate agriculture and its failure to manage food production responsibly.
last month’s UN report from the world’s leading climate change scientists would seem to back him up with its urgent call for us all to eat less meat.
‘The Greenprint is the dietary version of a carbon footprint,’ he says. ‘Skipping a burger once a week for a year is the equivalent of
driving 320 fewer miles.’ But is a vegan diet really do-able for most of us? Burgers make him shudder, and yet fast food is cheap and easy. A take-away burger will always be less expensive than chickpea tabbouleh at Planet Organic.
‘People say, well, this lifestyle of yours is quite elitist and expensive to follow. I reject that absolutely — a pound of spinach doesn’t cost more than a pound of beef — but even if it was, we have to have a conversation about priorities.’
As for accusations that his diet is too restrictive, Borges says they come from people who simply don’t understand his regime, and indeed his book devotes many pages to sources of vegan protein, iron and other vitamins and minerals (while also admitting he takes a daily B12 vitamin supplement himself).
On this, the lay person just has to choose which expert to believe.
What it’s not, quite literally, is a mindless lifestyle. Borges’ diet requires thought, commitment and time. And yet it’s also very much of the moment, with veganism increasingly seen as a mainstream choice compared even to five years ago.
‘We’re in the middle of a big tidal wave of change,’ Borges states.
‘It’s not just about food, it’s a whole mindset.
‘The planet has become such a dangerous place, and people are starting to realise that they need to be the change they want to see. I think that within the next ten years, this [vegan] lifestyle will be the norm.’
His enthusiasm — idealism — is infectious, and if his 22 rules are a little too cultish for the cynic, they clearly work for the true believer. Oh, and apparently you get Beyonce’s thighs, too.
The Greenprint by Marco Borges, with an introduction by Jay-Z and Beyoncé, is published by hQ, harperCollins in ebook and paperback.