No cheat days, even on vacation! Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady’s personal chef, Joanne Gerrard Young, who has cooked for the pair for the last five years at their vacation home in Costa Rica, revealed what they really eat in an interview with Well + Good.
The football star and supermodel’s extreme healthy eating habits were first publicized when their Boston-based chef, Allen Campbell, told Boston.com that they avoid white sugar, white flour, coffee, caffeine, dairy and even inflammatory nightshade vegetables like tomatoes and peppers.
It turns out they adhere to their restricted diet in Costa Rica as well. “They don’t always do raw, but since it’s so easy to do in Costa Rica, we do a 80/20 raw diet, with big colorful salads and lots of fresh veggies,” said Young, a master raw food chef and holistic nutritionist. This plan is a mostly plant-based diet that means they eat raw foods 80 percent of the time and allow themselves to eat non-raw foods 20 percent of the time.”
“‘G’ likes to eat vegetarian sometimes, so we’ll do a grain separate from the protein, and she’s totally into juice cleanses, so she’ll do about one per year,” Young continued. “They didn’t want to do desserts anymore, for healthy eating purposes, but I shared all of my raw vegan desserts with them and they love them and have them all the time,” she explained.
With 38-year-old Brady’s football schedule, he only goes down to Costa Rica about once a year, but Bündchen, 35, regularly travels down to Central America and always requests Young as her local chef. The former Victoria’s Secret Angel praised Young on the chef’s website, Healing Cuisine: “Eating Joanne’s healing food reminds me of our connection to this beautiful planet,” Bündchen said.