Tips From Her Cookbook and Life
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Gisele Bündchen is beginning a new chapter in her life. Since the end of her 14-year marriage with the retired football star Tom Brady, in the fall of 2022, the Brazilian supermodel and environmentalist is back in the public eye with a new cookbook, Nourish: Simple Recipes to Empower Your Body & Feed Your Soul.
Famous for her lean and lithe figure, the 43-year-old mother of two takes a balanced, mind-body approach to diet, fitness, and wellness. While her lifestyle is aspirational to most of us, her new cookbook is accessible and family-friendly, filled with recipes for snacks, sweets, smoothies, bowls, and kid-friendly meals like baked chicken meatballs (she uses gluten-free almond flour as a binder).
In her cookbook, Bündchen showcases ingredients like avocado oil, cashew cream, and psyllium husk powder. She also writes about eating regimens she has abandoned and tells how she stays centered despite the stress of a complicated personal and professional life.
Read on to learn more about Gisele’s diet and healthy mind-body habits.
1. She Starts the Day With Tepid Lemon Water, Meditation, and a Dog Walk
Bündchen likes to wake up early and hydrate with a glass of lukewarm lemon water with a pinch of high-mineral salt (she prefers Celtic salt). She opts for lukewarm water, she explains, because her mother used to tell her it doesn’t “give your system a shock.”
Proper hydration can affect everything from organ function to sleep quality, with a person’s specific hydration needs varying based on factors like body weight, activity level, and age. Bündchen says she aims for 10 glasses of water a day.
After a few minutes of meditation, she takes her dogs for a 30-minute walk. (She also takes them for an after-dinner walk.)
2. Her Diet Is Mostly but Not Entirely Plant-Based
About 80 percent of Bündchen’s diet is plant-based, she writes in Nourish. But there were a few years where she was vegan or vegetarian, which she saw as a way to align her passion for animals and the environment with her eating habits.
Keri Gans, RDN, the owner of Keri Gans Nutrition in New York City and author of The Small Change Diet, notes that a plant-based diet “is definitely a smart decision for being more environmentally conscious.”
Although Bündchen loved this way of eating, she says she developed anemia, a condition in which a person doesn’t have enough healthy red blood cells or hemoglobin to carry oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. The condition left her feeling zapped of energy.
When iron supplements didn’t help, Bündchen tried adding more animal protein to her diet and found that even a small amount each week was enough to alleviate the problem. In the cookbook she shares a favorite recipe for crispy salmon served simply with lemon, olive oil, and herbs.
Her desire to be vegan or vegetarian, but her physical inability to do so, was a humbling lesson. “It taught me to be flexible, listen to my body, and do what felt best for it, even if that wasn’t what I wanted at first,” she writes.
3. She Keeps Raw Vegetables Prepped and Ready to Eat
Bündchen ate a raw food diet for a few years, but ultimately decided it wasn’t for her. But “going raw” is still part of her current way of eating. She loves the taste and texture of raw vegetables and keeps carrots, cucumbers, celery, and radishes prepped and ready to eat. “My kids will plow through a whole plate of these in the minutes before dinner,” she writes.
Gans endorses eating more vegetables, raw or cooked. Raw vegetables are not always healthier than cooked, she notes, but you should always avoid overcooking. “Many vegetables have higher antioxidant content when cooked, such as beta-carotene in carrots and lycopene in tomatoes,” she says.
4. French Fries and Gelato Are Not Off-Limits
Even though Bündchen knows some foods might make her feel not-so-hot later, she still has the occasional treat of truffle fries, gelato, or a baguette with French butter. “I still sometimes have it. I’m human!” she writes. (Do we believe her?)
But these foods are the exception, not the rule. Bright and early the next day, Bündchen gets back on course and returns to eating foods that better support her health goals, she writes.
5. Never Say Never — Except to Ultra-Processed Foods
Reflecting on the way that her diet has evolved through the years, Bündchen recommends flexibility in eating habits. “Never say never — life is too short,” she writes.
But she does have a few absolutes, and one of them is a personal ban on junk food. “No McDonald’s or shelf-stable cupcakes or candy for me. My body is my temple, and my temple is sacred. Eating processed food is not being loving to myself,” she writes.
6. She’s Into Tea
“I loooove teas because they always make me feel good,” Bündchen shared on Instagram in October 2023 along with a display of favorites such as ginger and peppermint for digestion, chamomile and lemon balm for relaxation, and lemongrass and green tea for an energy boost. (That tea post got almost half a million likes.)
Gans applauds Gisele’s passion for tea, “as it is packed with nutrients with anti-inflammatory properties that may help prevent certain cancers, decrease heart disease, and maintain immune health,” she says.
7. She’s Cut Out Coffee and Alcohol
Bündchen has an on-again-off-again relationship with caffeine. Although it tends to make her agitated and jittery, she has turned to coffee to help her survive traveling through time zones, and during her training for a half-Ironman race. But these days, she’s not drinking coffee, opting for a caffeine-free dandelion tea instead.
Although her alcohol use was never problematic, Bündchen hasn’t had a drink in two years, according to her new book. She says she felt it was a social crutch that helped her make awkward situations bearable, but she didn’t like the headaches and brain fog the day after.
Without alcohol, she’s better able to “keep promises to myself to start each day strong,” she writes in Nourish.
8. Juice Cleanses Aren’t Part of Her Life Anymore …
For many years, Bündchen would do juice cleanses, sometimes for days, and sometimes in silence as a way to clear her mind and her body and reset. But she admits that the practice of drinking only fruit and vegetable juice takes attention and commitment and is tough to do while balancing work and being a mom.
“It’s not a part of my life — at least for now,” she writes.
9. … But She’s ‘Experimenting’ With Smoothies
In her new cookbook, Bündchen discusses a new diet experiment: replacing a single meal with a smoothie. She finds this “more gentle mentally and physically” than a juice cleanse.
Her pro tips: She juices fruit the night before and puts it in the fridge already in the blender jar. She prefers to use juice rather than water and ice because it makes the smoothie more nutritionally dense.
When it’s smoothie-making time, she gets the blender out of the fridge and throws in frozen fruit (often bananas, pears, or papaya) and ingredients like protein powder or dates, then purees.
10. She Loves Yoga, Riding Horses, and Bouncing on a Trampoline
In Nourish, Bündchen notes that she has long practiced yoga as a way to deal with stress or feeling overwhelmed.
In her 2018 book, Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life, she elaborates: “[Yoga is] so serene that I can be in a state of meditation while I practice. Whether it involves music or mantras or breath work or meditation, [yoga is] a powerful, beautiful spiritual practice. Yoga gave me back my life.”
In addition to yoga, Bündchen tries to do a few different types of physical activity each day. “Body movement is huge in my life,” she writes. In addition to weights and cardio in the gym, she loves to paddleboard, bike, horseback ride, surf, and bounce on the trampoline — ideally along with her children.
Additional reporting by Leah Groth.
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