Gisele Bündchen on healthy eating and unhealthy relationships

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 treat 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 glittering 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.

At present she sat, dressed in faded Levi’s and a white waffleknit shirt – so informal she might have been mistaken for the prettiest mom at school pickup. But when the sun filtered in and her gaze narrowed, the face that sold millions of Victoria’s Secret bras came into focus.

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. The move was as documented by ESPN as it was by the Instagram gossip account Deuxmoi.

The gist: 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.

Recently, paparazzi spotted Bündchen on an apparent date with her jujitsu trainer Joaquim Valente. Brady has been photographed with other women since the split, but Bündchen has faced accusations he has been spared – rumors that her relationship with Valente predated her divorce.

“I really don’t want to make my life a tabloid,” she said. “I don’t want to open myself up to all of that.” But the stories seemed to her more insidious and more familiar, too: The trope of the adulterous wife is as old as time. In no uncertain terms, she refuted the charge that she had cheated: “That is a lie.”

“This is something that happens to a lot of women who get blamed when they have the courage to leave an unhealthy relationship and are labeled as being unfaithful,” Bündchen said. “They have to deal with their communities. They have to deal with their family. Of course for me, it just happens to be a little bit amplified.”

Bündchen waved off the particulars of her former relationship to make a broader point.

“No one really knows what happens between two people, only the two people in the relationship,” she said. She noted that she has been divorced for almost 18 months. In that time, Brady has appeared to move on. Now she has, too.

Yes, she confirmed, she is dating someone, and it’s new, and she’s protective. “This is the first time I am seeing someone that was a friend of mine first,” she said. “It’s very different. It is very honest, and it’s very transparent.”

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.’”

Her twin sister, Patricia, attested to Bündchen’s handiness and tenacity. “She has the ability to nail, screw, sand, fix anything,” she wrote in an email. “She really gets her hands dirty.”

This month, Bündchen will release 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.

After the split, Bündchen also purchased a palatial estate in Surfside, Florida, across the water from Brady’s mansion in the exclusive Indian Creek enclave. A strong-shouldered swimmer could swim from dock to dock. While that residence is under construction, she has moved into an intimate suburban cottage on a thumbtack of land. If Bündchen wanted to, she could shake hands with her neighbor through the kitchen window.

Like millions of Americans (including Bündchen’s own children), the people next door have perhaps encountered tabloid stories about her post-divorce life.

Sometimes the attention roils her. When the coverage needles Bündchen, she said her daughter comforts her. “She’s like, ‘Mommy, you always told me not to listen to the gossip and the lies.’ It’s funny because the things you teach your kids, they come back and teach you.”

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 afterschool 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.’”

It was an adjustment after the divorce to not have her children with her all the time. But she has since realized the advantages of solo parenting. “They get to have