Bündchen on healthy eating — and living
Supermodel’s new cookbook has 100 recipes with tweaks
MIAMI — Beautiful people are not spared the indignities of overextended joints, which is how supermodel Gisele Bündchen found herself staring down the barrel of two shoulder surgeries in 2019 and 2020.
At the time, Bündchen was living in Boston with NFL quarterback Tom Brady, then her husband, still recovering from an operation on her back to an injury she’d incurred falling off a horse. She’d refused the procedure at first, throwing herself into holistic alternatives like acupuncture. But the MRIS revealed what the fashion shoots and paparazzi photos could not: Nearing 40, she was in tatters.
“I never felt so depressed and vulnerable,” Bündchen, now 43, recalled.
She couldn’t lift her own luggage or pick up her two young children, Benjamin and Vivian. “If I was sitting, I was hurting,” she said.
Bündchen winced as she recalled her months in and out of the operating room. It has been a taxing few years. She lives in Miami now, having left the frigid Massachusetts winters behind for the warmer climes of Florida with its easier access to her native Brazil.
Brady had retired and unretired in rapid succession, trading his beloved game and the New England Patriots for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. (He would last three seasons.) Fan accounts speculated about Bündchen’s resentment over his sudden switch. Reddit warriors accused her of dampening his triumphant comeback.
Within months of the relocation, the two shared almost identical statements announcing their divorce.
Before the surgeries, Bündchen vowed to transform her own health. Long before most of America realized juicing could be a verb, Bündchen drank her vegetables.
She had been religious about workouts, building a pickleball court and a yoga pavilion at her beachside retreat in Costa Rica. Now she has focused on her strength.
When the movers came to pack up the home she shared with Brady, she demonstrated her newfound power, hoisting boxes and rolling out the furniture. She carried a table out to the truck. “Those guys! If you saw their faces,” she said, “they were like, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”
Bündchen just released her first cookbook, “Nourish: Simple Recipes to Empower Your Body and
Feed Your Soul,” which features 100 recipes, one of which is the fresh summer roll with cashew dipping sauce that she served as lunch on the afternoon of this interview. She did indeed get her hands dirty, folding wet rice paper over mounds of vegetable matchsticks. She worked at her kitchen island, a white slab that sits at the center of the modest Miami home she acquired in 2022.
She loves the intimacy of this house. Washing her hands at the sink, Bündchen gestured to the children’s bedroom doors. “When I’m like, ‘Benny, Vivi, dinner!’ it’s like, ‘You are hearing me,’ ” she said. “‘You’re definitely hearing me.’ ”
She has dispensed with a big staff. She makes breakfast and picks her children up from after-school sports. Chores have become a focus. “Now that I’m here, I can be alone with them,” she said. Later, she added,
“They have to help me, and I tell them that. I say, ‘Listen, I understand we had chefs working with us and all that, but Mommy is choosing to do it this way right now.’ ”
Bündchen announced she would leave the runway behind in 2015, making a conscious choice to pull back from work. Still, she raked in millions of dollars in partnerships with designers like Chanel and brands like Pantene. Since the divorce, she has been working with many other fashion labels, including Louis Vuitton, Alaïa, Balmain and Frame.
Next year marks her 30th working in the industry.
She insisted she would not retire, but intends for the milestone to mark the end of this phase of her career.
“I feel like that’s a good time to have some closure and to start a new season,” she said.
Whatever comes next, she doesn’t care to make it look easy. Bündchen is quick to point out that she hired someone to help her finish and test the recipes in “Nourish.” “I’m like, ‘Just put a bit of this, a bit of that,’ ” she said, of recipe writing.
Almost all of the recipes in the book include improvisational tweaks, meant for parents who cook like she does and have children
with a palate like hers. “One day they like carrots, the next day they hate carrots,” she said, nodding toward the summer rolls.
Vegetable-related grievances she can accommodate. But she only has so much time to prepare them for the world outside her kitchen, where mistakes are inevitable.
She has survived her own disappointments; she hopes her children learn to as well.
“We cannot live life wrapped up in Bubble Wrap,” she said. This, from a woman who can now put her detractors in a headlock. She is less fragile than she thought.