Giada Style
FOOD NETWORK STAR GIADA DE LAURENTIIS DISHES ABOUT HER NEW COOKBOOK, DOING HER SHOW AT HOME DURING THE PANDEMIC AND TOURING ITALY WITH BOBBY FLAY.
Just over 10 years ago, Giada De Laurentiis was roaring into her 40s and had already tasted impressive success. She’d won an Emmy for her first Food Network series, Everyday Italian (followed by two more for Giada Entertains last year), and penned five bestselling cookbooks.
“I started getting really busy,” says De Laurentiis. American audiences couldn’t get enough of the petite Roman-born, American-raised chef ’s sunny passport to authentic Italian fare. As one of Food Network’s brightest stars, over the next decade she’d add a slew of new shows to her schedule (including Giada Entertains, Giada in Italy and Giada on the Beach) and open three restaurants (Giada and Pronto by Giada on the Las Vegas Strip and GDL Italian in Baltimore) while turning out another five cookbooks. Her latest, Eat Better, Feel Better, was published this month, and in many ways it’s her most personal yet.
A NEW WAY OF EATING
“It seemed like the busier I got, the sicker I got,” De Laurentiis, now 50, recalls. At first, she chalked it up to frequent travel and having a young child (daughter Jade, now 12, with ex-husband Todd Thompson) who brought home every bug from school. But
that didn’t explain a constant sinus infection, rosacea, bloating, constipation, swelling under her eyes, fatigue and brain fog.
To boost her energy, she’d feed her sweet tooth. “I’d rely on a spoonful of straight sugar, a handful of chocolate chips, whatever it took to keep me going,” she says. “I remember this older DP [director of photography] saying to me on the set, ‘You know, you can’t do this forever.’ And I’d look at him and go, ‘Sugar and I—we’re best friends.’”
More like frenemies, she realized as she got older, as were classic Italian staples like pasta, bread and cheese. “I love those things, and they were so ingrained in my upbringing, my childhood,” De Laurentiis says. “When I thought of comfort food, those were things I thought of.” Finally, she began to reevaluate what she was eating. Even though she was a seasoned chef, De Laurentiis found she had a lot to learn. “I felt I knew everything there was to know about eating healthy and cooking and making the right choices,” she says. “It took me a long time to figure out that I really didn’t know as much as I thought.”