On Thursday, Gisele Bündchen went on The View and told the hosts that changing her diet played a key role in helping her recover from the “severe depression and panic attacks” she experienced in her 20s. Bündchen, who is currently promoting a cookbook called Nourish, claimed that her lifestyle choices were the main factors that contributed to her poor mental health.
When host Joy Behar suggested that the anxiety and depression might have been caused by “the fact that you left your family at 14,” Bündchen expertly dodged the remark. Despite being emancipated from her family, moving across the world, and modeling as a young teenager, the supermodel said that she was loving her life at the time and feeling “really independent.”
Bündchen described her experience as a teenage model as “100 miles per hour.” “I thought it was an amazing life,” she said. “I was working seven days a week and I was in the hamster wheel and I just wasn’t conscious. When you’re 14, what do you know?” That lifestyle caught up to her in her early 20s, when she began having severe panic attacks. After “going through all the specialists,” Bündchen said she turned to a naturopath.
“He said to me, ‘Gisele, we have to change your diet,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Diet? What does that have to do with panic attacks?’ And he’s like, ‘No, it has everything to do with it.’” Bündchen admitted that at the time she was drinking, smoking, “having coffee,” not sleeping, and, according to this naturopath, “eating terrible all day.”
Eventually, she was told that she needed to change her diet, get eight hours of sleep, and exercise daily. Once she did that, she said she became a different person, one who did yoga and breathwork and meditation. And poof! There goes the depression. If you’ve been searching for the cure to your mental illness, have you tried cutting out sugar, which Bündchen called “poison” in The Wall Street Journal Magazine earlier this week? The next time you’re feeling low, consider using dates instead. That should do the trick.