Stars Go from Flab to Fab!

• April 13, 2009
• Vol. 71
• No. 14

How I Let Myself Go

By MONICA RIZZO

Once Celebrated for Her Bikini Body, Former Supermodel Kathy Ireland Slowly Packed on 25 Lbs. Over the Years. Now the Busy Mom of Three Opens Up About How She Regained Control of Her Weight—and Her Life

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From PEOPLE Magazine

Last December former supermodel Kathy Ireland was indulging in one of her favorite pastimes at home in Santa Barbara: baking cookies. At the same time, her 14-year-old son Erik was running around the house snapping photos when he captured a candid of his mom that made him snicker. "I said, 'What's so funny?'" recalls Ireland. "And he said 'Mom, you look pregnant!'"

Ready to dismiss the comment as typical teen exaggeration, she took a peek. "I didn't recognize the person I saw," Ireland confesses. "What I saw was someone who looked overwhelmed, overstressed, overweight, over-everything."

But rather than hit delete, Ireland—the 5'10" model whose killer body and piercing green eyes graced the cover of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's swimsuit issue three times between 1989 and 1994—decided it was time to get her body back under control. "I wasn't going to destroy the picture and pretend this isn't true," she says, curling up on a plush couch in the family's five-bedroom Tuscan-style home. "What would that be saying to my kids?"

Candidly talking about her 25-lb. weight gain that happened "all over, but the bulk of it was in my stomach," Ireland, 46, wants to send a message to all mothers that, yes, even a former supermodel deals with the battle of the bulge. "I was just not making enough time to take care of me," says the author of the new book Real Solutions for Busy Moms. "When I saw that image, I thought, '50 is going to come here before I know it, and if I stay on this path it's only going to get worse.' It's not just about appearance. An extra 25 lbs. could lead to diabetes or high blood pressure. It's not good for your joints—and I've got a bum knee from a ski accident. It's just not healthy."

Ireland never intended to lose her way. The weight crept up incrementally. By 1993 she began transitioning out of modeling, trading in swimsuits for business suits and starting Kathy Ireland World Wide with a line of designer socks. "It was wonderful to not be judged by what I looked like," says Ireland, who continued the same eating habits she had her whole life. "There was really no limit to what I ate. I kept growing taller until I was 20, and I had this great metabolism." Her biggest weakness? Dessert. "I have a sweet tooth," she says. "I pretty much had dessert with every meal."

But once she hit her 40s, "things changed, and so did my body," says Ireland, who has grown her business into a $1.4 billion design empire that now includes furniture, flooring, lighting, jewelry, skin care and apparel. "As my career expanded, so did my waistline." During business calls, she routinely reached for her office candy stash. And once when a coworker called her out for shoveling cookies into her mouth during a meeting, "I got defensive," she admits.

Ireland lived in a bit of denial too. When she picked up clothes back from the cleaners that no longer fit, "I let my suits out because they were 'shrinking,'" she says with a wink.

Balancing her role as C.E.O. and M.O.M. to Erik, Lily, 10, and Chloe, 6, with husband Greg Olsen, 50, an emergency-room doctor, Ireland also often found herself snacking on sweets and eating on the go as she shuttled the kids to school and their extracurriculars. "I was really eating unconsciously," she says. "Sometimes I would have ice cream for breakfast! I had to have my sweet fix."

But once she saw Erik's photo, she knew she needed to change her lifestyle. Ireland reached out to her close friend and trainer Jenny Schatzle, who helped her slowly get back into a fitness and nutrition routine. (See box page 66.)

"At first I was going to cut out bread and desserts, but that made me too cranky," she admits. "I'm focusing more on vegetables and healthy fats like avocado. And I'm cooking with olive oil."

Now with half the unwanted weight already gone, Ireland feels a huge difference. Along with taking long hikes with her kids, Ireland recently celebrated her 46th birthday with a surfing session alongside her husband. "Not carrying all that extra weight made it so much easier," says Ireland. But the best part? "I could get the wet suit zipped up without sucking my stomach in!"

Still, she insists, losing the weight is not for her vanity. "I'm a work in progress. My goal is to be healthy," she says. "If I end up liking the way I look because I've made healthy choices, then that's icing on the cake—the kind of icing I can really enjoy."

More From This Article

How She Dropped the Weight

Her plan for taking off the pounds that had crept on over the years was a matter of basic math: "Increasing the activity and decreasing the calories," Ireland says. That means she schedules at least three hour-long workouts a week, ranging from hitting the gym with trainer Jenny Schatzle for weight training and cardio workouts on the treadmill to hiking in the hills, cycling and surfing with her family. As for her diet, "I want to enjoy food but keep it in perspective," says Ireland, who swapped her usual lunch of a sandwich with fries for a grilled chicken salad and now snacks on raw almonds and fruit when she's on the go. "I still have fries, but much smaller portions." And when she craves sweets, "I make myself earn it," says Ireland, who savored a small but satisfying slice of her favorite dessert—chocolate cake—for her birthday. "I have to burn enough calories that week, and if I don't, then maybe next week we'll do better. That gives me incentive."

On Her Swimsuit Years ...

Prepping for three SPORTS ILLUSTRATED swimsuit covers would seem like the perfect reason to go on a diet. Not for Ireland. "I never had to do without" food, she says. Though she once buckled under peer pressure and ate "carrots and nothing" with her model roommates, Ireland didn't even last a day. "We lived across the street from Baskin-Robbins, and at 11 o'clock at night I couldn't take it anymore," she recalls. "So I went across the street and had the biggest thing they had." Along with following an active lifestyle to stay trim, Ireland stuck to her modeling mantra: "My attitude was, 'If they like me for who I am, great. If not, I'll do something else. I'm not going to do anything unhealthy or drastic to work in this business.'"