hard, exercises, wants to be her best, look her best, and have the best. The second is the underachiever who thinks she’ll never be good enough, who waits instead of acts, then blames and shames the world for not being there for her. I want you to aspire to be an overachiever who always tries to be her best. “Try” is the operative word.
Here’s how to do that:
Make good choices.
Be vain; vanity is actually about self-preservation.
Take care of yourself and your friends.
When in doubt, have fun.
When you’re sad, cry to a friend, not to a bucket of KFC.
When you’re down on yourself, ask anyone anywhere “How are you ?”
Keep smiling.
Stay positive and move forward. This is your last try at today. Yesterday may not have been great, but, today is better—you just need to see it that way. The choice is up to you.
I’ve already said that you need to treat your body like a Ferrari, but maybe you prefer a Maserati, an Aston Martin, a Corvette, or even a Bentley. Whatever your luxury car of choice, if you treat it well, it will increase in value; if you treat it like a bargain rental car, it’s just going to wear out—and being worn out is not hot! I assume you wouldn’t fill up your luxury car with cheap, sub-optimal gas. So why would you try to fuel your body with poor-quality food? Or try to run it on empty? Eating well is 80 percent of maintaining a healthy weight. Exercise is keeping the engine moving. Don’t confuse the two. It’s not about working out more so that you can eat whatever you want. If you’re not nourishing yourself well, no matter how much you exercise, you won’t be getting the most out of what you’re doing. As a young athlete I’d always known that, but when I started modeling and listening to everyone telling me I needed to lose ten pounds, everything I’d known flew out the window. I lost my way and had to get back on the right track.
When we were both nineteen and living in Paris, model Elaine Irwin and I tried the white diet. For several days we ate nothing but cereal and rice. It certainly gave us a lot of energy, but it was also boring. It wasn’t any fun sitting at a café with our friends wearing our tight black miniskirts (the model’s uniform of the ’90s) and watching them enjoy their dinner while we ate nothing because we’d already consumed enough rice and cereal for an entire small nation. After a few days we were both starving and bored.
What did I learn from that? Food deprivation does two things: It makes you irritable and it leads to binge eating.
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Model diet secrets that DON’T work. (I’ve even tried some myself!)
Eating nothing but cereal and rice for days does not work.
Cigarettes do not work.
Drugs do not work.
The alcohol diet does not work.
Binging and purging does not work. In fact, it makes your face look bloated. Who wants a thin body and a fat face!
Diuretic teas do not work.
Enemas do not work.
The Graham cracker diet does not work.
A vegetarian diet with no starch and no protein does not work.
The tapeworm diet does not work. Instead of making you thin, it makes you dead.
Eating nothing but an apple a day for a week does not work (although it does save you money).
Liquid diets do not work. They don’t teach you how to eat well; they just teach you how to not eat.
Eating Kleenex to make yourself feel full does not work.
Strict diets of any kind do not work. (Rules are meant to be broken.)
Starving yourself does not work.
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When it comes to food choices, I’ve probably made every mistake in the book. A real biggie occurred when I was about to give birth to my daughter Sea. I remember it clearly to this day. I was sitting on the red leather couch in our apartment and I felt my first contraction. I immediately screamed to my husband, who, having gone through it before, went to the gym. I’d been told that you should eat light when you’re about to give birth, so I decided I needed to eat and ordered Chinese chicken soup with