Gisele Bündchen said she overhauled her lifestyle after severe anxiety and panic attacks almost led her to take her own life.
In an interview with Vogue Australia, the supermodel explained how the unhealthy lifestyle she led in her 20s resulted in serious mental health problems — which she opened up about in her 2018 book “Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life” — but transforming her lifestyle and adopting healthier habits saw her turning her life around.
“I felt like I reached rock bottom,” Bündchen, 39, told the magazine. “It became so unbearable I couldn’t breathe and I thought: ‘I gotta change.'”
The Brazilian model and environmental activist explained that she used to have a sugar-laden mocha frappuccino for breakfast, steak and French fries with a bottle of wine for dinner, and smoke a pack of cigarettes every day.
Transitioning away from that lifestyle “wasn’t easy,” Bündchen said. But she did it and hasn’t looked back.
“I had the worst headaches ever because I was withdrawing,” she said. “My system was so used to that life it was in shock because I stopped everything, so it took time.
“We are beings of habit and I think you can’t just expect to do something you have always done and stop. You have to replace bad habits with good habits.
“So when I stopped having coffee, the mocha frappuccino for breakfast, and four cigarettes when I woke up in the morning, I started running.
“I don’t run anymore, but I ran then because it allowed me to feel my lungs and every time I ran for 20 minutes I was like: ‘Okay, I can feel my lungs, okay, I’m not smoking.'”
Bündchen said she also started incorporating meditation and breathing techniques to help combat her anxiety.
“I would get into the elevator and I would feel like I was going to die,” she said. “So I replaced bad habits with things that were supporting me and I realised that every day I was feeling better.”
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Bündchen’s holistic existence now couldn’t be more different from her previous lifestyle.
The mother-of-two (and step-mother of one) starts her day at 5.30 a.m., getting up before anyone else in her family to meditate, breathe, stretch, swirl coconut oil around her mouth, have a green juice, and get a workout in on her elliptical machine.
If she can’t do that, she’ll work up a sweat at her husband, footballer Tom Brady’s Boston gym TB12.
And she’s evangelical about the importance of looking after yourself by eating well and moving — and how this will in turn lead to outward beauty too.
“You can go and buy all the products you want, but if you are not nourishing your body by eating nutritious food, if you are not exercising and oxygenating your blood and doing things that bring you joy, you are not going to feel good, and if you don’t feel good you are not going to look good,” Bündchen said.
“I have never seen someone who doesn’t feel good looking good, have you?”
Read more:
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