Nutrition

Gemini Model & Talent Agency

Nutrition for Aspiring Models

Models are very conscious of their figure and physique.. They spend a lot of time and energy to trying to stay slim. They try to maintain a particular body weight, or slightly lower at times. Models have a specific schedule of work outs, beauty regime and time with their personal trainers.

Nutrition Tips For Fashion Models

Here are a few model diet tips to you started:

Before you start a particular workout regime, take a photo of yourself in a bikini. Do this on a weekly basis, as it helps in keeping a check of your waistline.
A food diary also helps in keeping a track of your food intake. A daily review of the diet is essential. This helps in avoiding unwanted foods by the next day.
Hydrating your body is essential and helps you in avoiding certain intakes. Thirst is misunderstood, many a times for hunger. Adequate water and liquids in the diet helps in warding hunger and helps to eliminate wastes and toxins.
Chew well and eat. Proper mastication prevents over eating, as the brain waits to hear the signals from the stomach. As the hunger pangs are removed, the brain receives a stop signal from the stomach
A coffee or diet beverages help to postpone hunger.
Vegetable sauces and mustard help in sandwiches, instead of mayonnaise and cream sauces.
Supermodel diet tips comprise of tomatoes, apples, lettuce and diet coke.
Healthy snacks stacked in the pantry helps a lot.
Green tea or plain tea helps in eliminating your hunger, in a temporary manner.
Avoid deep fat frying. Baking, boiling, grilling, stewing, micro waving and pressure cooking are the best methods of cooking.
Keep a food list while doing your monthly purchase. This would help to avoid impulsive purchase.
A healthy breakfast is the right way to start your day. Skipping breakfast increases the pangs of hunger by the end of the day.
Skinless poultry, fish and lean meat are recommended animal foods.
Freshly cut fruits and vegetables are healthy snacks.
Saturated and Trans fats namely, margarine, butter, clarified butter are replaced by vegetable oils, such as olive, flaxseed, safflower and sunflower oil.
Certain hair styles help in changing the personality of a model.
The kind of clothes, the stripes, the colours make a lot of difference and are individual based.
Optimism and positive thinking brings out the inner beauty of individuals.
Regular exercise helps in shaping up models. Diet when clubbed with aerobics and weight training exercise proves beneficial in enhancing your svelte figure.

Eating Out the Healthy Way

Even the best planned diet can come unstuck at a Christmas party, birthday dinner or barbecue. Often the temptations are just too great. Yet models have some of the most active social lives of anyone, so exactly how do they do it and stay so slim?

It take real discipline, but there are also plenty of tips and tricks that we use as models. Events like these are not just for fun, they are a part of the social networking that goes into a successful modelling career. This page is about how models manage to diet successfully without compromising a fun social life.

Restaurant Food

When faced with a delicious menu, its all too easy to let your stomach do the ordering rather than your brain! Here are some tips to help you stay on track when eating out in a restaurant.

At buffets, pick up the smallest plate you can find. Whatever size you choose, you will usually feel compelled to fill it!
Before dinner, drink a cup of green tea or some Perrier with a slice of lemon. Both will help to reduce your appetite. Going to a restaurant when you're really hungry is tempting fate.
Don't follow the crowd and order a 3 course meal. If you feel that you have to, try to choose light options like a consommé, fruit plate or sorbet.
Order an appetizer instead of a main course - portions have grown in recent years and you really don't need more.
Don't order anything with sauce. That grilled chicken may sound light, but not if its drowning in a creamy sauce! In an Italian restaurant, order the tomato-based sauces rather than the cream-based ones.
Order your food steamed, baked, grilled or poached, rather than fried or deep fried.
Substitute salad for the fries or potatoes that come with your meal.
Watch your salad dressing! Caesar salad can be just as fattening as a burger
If the waiter brings you bread before the meal, send it right back or you'll end up full before the meal.
You don't need to finish the whole meal, or have that extra helping. Most restaurants are happy to provide a doggy bag.
Be prepared to face diet saboteurs - when your friend says "go ahead, the cheesecake here is divine, one piece won't hurt", remember that you chose a healthy main course. Why blow it with an extra 400 calories!

Cocktail Parties

After a couple of drinks and a few rounds of the hors d'oeuvres tray, you suddenly realize that you've consumed about 3,000 calories without even realizing it. That's a pretty typical experience around Christmas time, but there are simple ways to survive a cocktail party without putting on five pounds.

Foods to avoid on the snacks table - samosas, chicken nuggets etc. Stay away from anything fried or covered in sauce.
By drinking Diet Coke with your cocktail, you can control your appetite and be better prepared when the hors d'oeuvres come around.
Find a place far away from the snacks table and do all your socializing there. Don't be one of those people loitering around the hors d'oeuvres!
Limit yourself to one snack at a time. Eating slowly will help you to eat less.
Aim for dishes like the hummus platter, with carrot and celery to dip. Even though hummus has a lot of calories, eating the vegetables will help.
During the holidays it's important not to tell yourself it's the holidays and pig out thoughtlessly. Before you know it from Thanksgiving until New Years will add up to 10-15 lbs. You can keep the scale from creeping too much up if you try to stay on track somewhat.

Alcoholic Drinks

When you have a birthday party or a work event to go to, its often extremely hard to avoid having a drink or two. Here are some tips to make sure that you don't ruin your diet in the process.
Light beers have fewer calories and will slow down your drinking.
Order your drinks with soda instead of tonic. Tonic has a surprising number of calories. The fruit juices in bars are full of sugar and even worse.
For a little more flavour to your drink, try Diet Coke or Diet Sprite as a mixer.
Try a white wine spritzer (white wine and soda). Its a great low calorie summer drink.
If you need to have a glass of wine, drink it with your meal rather than beforehand. Otherwise it will stimulate your appetite and destroy any willpower

How to Increase Your Metabolism

Models struggle with weight gain just as much as anyone else. And, like everyone else, once they hit 30 years old it becomes progressively harder. Studies show that after 30, women lose 1/2 a pound of muscle every year and gain the same amount in fat! If you want to go to castings, you need a way to stop this from happening.
Obviously going to the gym and eating right are important, but you can also make your body work for you. Increasing your metabolism, by reducing your alcohol consumption for example, means that even when you are at rest you are burning calories. Here are some great ideas that my friends in modelling have used.
The first instinct of many dieters is to put themselves on the starvation diet, but although this can help you quickly lose a couple of pounds, its not the right way to lose weight in the long run.
When your diet drops below 1000 calories, your body goes into 'starvation mode', which slows down your metabolism.
As well as feeling groggy and tired, you will be using far less calories than usual and making it even harder for yourself to lose weight! The answer is to eat a sustainable low-calorie diet, but never to make your body push the 'panic button' like this as it is counterproductive.
Also make sure to eat breakfast. If you skip it, your body will enter its 'starve' mode early in the day and it will be hard to break out. To keep your metabolism working all through the day, eat small, low calorie snacks between meals.
Although certainly not the most fun part of increasing your metabolism, cutting down your alcohol intake will help as much as anything. Studies show that alcohol suppresses the body's ability to burn fat.
It might be hard to completely cut alcohol out of an active social life, so why not try limiting yourself to one drink per night. If you make it a high-volume, low-alcohol drink (a light beer for example), you might find it easier to get through the evening!
Spicy food doesn't just taste great, it actually increases your metabolism too. Black Pepper, Ginger, Chilli Peppers and Cinnamon all raise your body temperature and help you burn fat faster!
Careful though - the curries you find in restaurants are often oily and fatty, so cooking your own spicy food is always best.

Drink More Water

Speed up your metabolism by drinking more water. A healthy, well-hydrated body is important to flush out toxins and aid in metabolizing fats. A simple way to determine if you are consuming enough water is to take note of the colour of your urine. If it is colourless or light yellow you are on the right track, if it's any darker you need to increase your water intake. Drinking ice water also helps the body expend more calories by heating it up.
Drinking ice cold water revs up your metabolism by using energy to warm it up. Also thirst is often mistaken for hunger so it's is important to drink lots of water.

Vitamin B and Calcium

The B-Vitamins give you more energy and increase your metabolism. Drinking coffee will increase your metabolism too, but Vitamin B is a much more healthy, sustainable way to do it. Make sure your daily supplement incorporates B-Vitamins and in particular B-12.
Recent research has found that 4 daily servings of low-fat dairy products can boost your body's fat-burning ability. Calcium actually increases your metabolism. So add some low-fat yogurts to your diet, maybe as a small snack between meals.

Increase your muscle mass

Muscle burns 90% more calories than fat, so the more muscle you have the faster your metabolism will be. Going to the gym is not just a one-off attack on your fat cells - your new muscle will actually keep fighting that fat long after you leave the gym. Adding 5lbs of muscle will help you burn another 250 calories a day!
If you can't make it to the gym, then there are ways to make everyday activities into a workout. Carry your groceries home, walk the dog yourself, lift small weights while watching TV or take the stairs at work - it all helps!

Boost Your Omega-3 Fatty Acids

In recent studies it has been shown that an increased intake of Omega 3 fatty acids can help to balance blood sugar levels and control appetite. They also reduce levels of Cortisol, a stress hormone responsible for storing fat.
Good sources of this metabolism-boosting acid can be found in flax, hemp seeds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, salmon, mackerel and herring. Many people use flax oil as a supplement.

Drink Green Tea!

Green tea regulates blood sugar levels by reducing the amount of insulin produced. This prevents fat being stored and keeps your appetite under control. A 1999 study showed that Green Tea extract resulted in a significant increase in energy expenditure.
EGCG, the main polyphenol in green tea, is an effective thermogenic which increases the metabolism of fat. This is not just a result of the caffeine in the tea, because those who lose weight on Green Tea lose more than those who were given caffeine alone.

Increase Your Iodine Intake

Increasing your Iodine intake can help stimulate thyroid gland function. The thyroid gland is responsible for regulating body metabolism and energy expenditure.
Kelp extract supplements are a potent source of Iodine, as well as eating all different types of seaweeds and seafood.

Turn Down The Heat

Keeping the room temperature a little chilly increases your metabolism and reduces your heating bills!

Blueberries and Watermelon

Here are two fruits that have been scientifically proven to boost your metabolism.
A study in the Journal of Nutrition has found that watermelon acts as a metabolism booster. It contains an amino acid named Arginine that promotes fat loss and increases muscle mass.
Watermelon and watermelon juice are really practical diet foods. Keep some frozen watermelon for a low calorie, metabolism-boosting snack.
If you're not a fan of watermelon, other sources of Arginine include dairy products, seafood, nuts and seeds.
Another study at the University of Michigan found those who ate a cup of blueberries a day had less fat than those who did not.
Blueberries contain a powerful antioxidant named Anthocyanin that may promote weight loss. It has also been shown that consuming blueberries actually reduces your food cravings!

Don't Stress If You Blow It!

If you fall off the wagon and completely blow your diet one day, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Your body is expecting a certain amount of calories a day, so a good pig-out will rev up that metabolism motor. So if one day a week you lose control, it's ok. Just forget about it and get back on track!