Tom Brady's diet is designed to make you pray for death

Even though I hate diets, there is always something appealing to me about a challenge. So, when the idea to try to do a week of Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s highly buzzed-about meal plan came up in a meeting, I — in a moment of poor judgment — said yes.

I should have known better. The diet was basically the opposite of what I regularly eat. There would be no bread. No cheese. No sugar, potatoes or mushrooms. There would be a lot of quinoa, kale, salmon (you know, all the things that are truly healthy). There was supposed to be no coffee, but I wouldn’t agree to the challenge without that one compromise. I needed coffee. And more importantly, my husband needed coffee.

The author’s husband, a Tom Brady mega-fanPhoto: Caitlin Abber

Yes, I enlisted my husband to do the diet with me. After all, there’s nothing worse than being on a diet while the person next to you is scarfing down a burrito. Plus, my husband is a huge, HUGE Tom Brady fan. He truly believes that Tom Brady didn’t have anything to do with those deflated balls. He has anxiety dreams where Tom Brady is disappointed in him. He even looks past Tom Brady’s tight friendship with Donald Trump. I knew he’d be game — he’s pretty much up for anything that brings him closer to Tom Terrific.

So we agreed to do this. Together. It would set us straight after a holiday season composed of too much champagne and takeout, and we would feel great and look great for an upcoming vacation. With earnest enthusiasm, I quickly began researching recipes and writing up a meal plan that we would start the next day.

Dinner, Day 1: This salmon.Photo: Caitlin Abber

Thursday

Breakfast: Coffee, Water with Lemon, Almond Milk and Berry Smoothies
Lunch: Veggie Sushi with Brown Rice
Dinner: Salmon Filets and Sauteed Kale
*prep quinoa bowls for next day’s lunch

The first day wasn’t that hard. We felt good and accomplished, and even though my salmon looked disgusting, we ate it with gusto. I prepped the quinoa bowls for lunch the following day and we went to bed that night feeling like half a million bucks.

Day 2: Not Brady-approved.Photo: Caitlin Abber

Friday

Breakfast: Coffee, Water with Lemon, Smoothies
Lunch: Quinoa & Kale Bowls
Snacks: Avocado Slices
Dinner: Baked Tofu with Veggies

The next morning we both “forgot” to bring the quinoa bowls to work. Okay, full disclosure: I actually worked from home that day and kept opening and closing the refrigerator, hoping something new would appear. Nothing did. The quinoa covered in sautéed kale kept looking at me. Sriracha has a lot of sugar in it, so I knew slathering it on top would kind of be cheating. My stomach growled. I looked at the clock. It hadn’t even been 36 hours since the diet began.

When my husband got home, I was in a state of complete fugue. “I’m exhausted,” he said, as he mindlessly poured himself a glass of wine. “Can we bail on this diet and order burgers?”
And so that’s what we did. And we were so happy about it.

Here’s why I think we failed so soon and so hard:

We don’t have a personal chef

I’m a good cook. I can make delicious pastas, soups, hearty meals for friends — but when it comes to healthy cooking, I am still learning how to sub this or add flavor to that to turn bland quinoa into something tasty and nutritious — and not a bastard version of a creamy risotto. The hubs has high cholesterol, so I should learn, but for now, I’m not talented enough to keep us alive on kale and beans.

We don’t have a ton of money

The personal chef is one thing, but we can’t even afford all of the food necessary to make this diet possible. I know that consuming loads of cheap, high-calorie food is a death sentence, but there has to be a better alternative than spending hundreds of dollars on chia seeds and coconut oil. Sure, broke people can eat healthy, too, but this diet is not for broke people.

We don’t want to spend our time prepping food we don’t want to eat

I know, I know, I should make healthy food I do want to eat. I should prep my lunches. I should make big batches of things. And sometimes I do that. Actually, just last Sunday I made a giant pot of this lemon rosemary lentil soup and it was the tits. But most weeknights? Nah, no thanks. I am happy to sautée some frozen veggies and mix in some protein, but I’m probably not going to want to eat it for lunch the next day. I live for variety and I despise routine. That’s probably why I always fail at diets — or never go on them — in the first place.

These might just sound like excuses to not at least try, but I don’t know why I even need to try in the first place. In a recent article for the Guardian, the great Lindy West discussed the issue with Oprah’s Weight Watchers campaign and the Brady-Bündchen diet, writing, “… even if you can afford a personal chef and/or have the time, money, and fortitude to follow that meal plan to the letter (it apparently requires three food dehydrators), it still will not magically transform you into Gisele Bündchen like some sort of Himalayan-salted, spirulina-laced witch’s brew. You are not her. You are you, which is enough.”

And Lindy is right. I am just me. I knew we were going to fail the Tom & Gisele diet. I knew I was going to let myself off the hook early and order those burgers within the first couple days. But I also knew I wasn’t going to feel bad about that. The fact of the matter is, my husband and I aren’t supposed to look like Gisele and Tom Brady — thankfully, it’s neither of our jobs to be super fit — so we don’t have to live like them either. Instead of feeling sad about failing at this diet, I actually feel really lucky that I can order nachos and not feel guilty about it. In that regard (and perhaps only in that regard), I am infinitely more #blessed than Gisele (woah, that’s a mindf–k).

Holding celebrities up to be bastions of health or happiness and trying to emulate them is a recipe for disappointment. We want to be happy, and we want to be healthy, but we need to do it in a way that makes sense for us — not them. And for me, sometimes that means having my cheese and eating it … often.

Sorry, Tom Brady: Quarterbacks aren’t actually that hot

As you watch Cam Newton face off against Peyton Manning later today, you might be thinking about their respective passing games, the strength of their offensive lines or whether hearing Coldplay during halftime will drain their will to play — or live.

Sports Illustrated journalist L. Jon Wertheim will have at least one other consideration in mind: whether Newton and Manning are better looking than their teammates.

“This is Your Brain on Sports,” Wertheim’s new book with psychologist Sam Sommers, takes a scientific approach to many of the quirks that guide athletes and sports fans alike, seeking to explain phenomena such as why we go crazy for T-shirt cannons (the power of “free”), or why watching rival teams lose makes us as happy as watching our own teams win (these events hit the brain’s pleasure centers in similar ways and with equivalent intensity).

One of the theories Wertheim and Sommers take on is whether quarterbacks are better looking than other players. Seeing Tom Brady with supermodel wife Gisele Bündchen, one might think the question’s been answered. But Wertheim and Sommers applied science to it, and what they found was surprising.


They cropped photos of all 32 NFL starting quarterbacks at the neck, so no uniform was visible, then did the same for wide receivers and defensive backs. They selected 100 people at random and asked them to rate the attractiveness of each face on a scale of 1 to 10.

Wertheim was shocked to find that quarterbacks ranked dead last. Asking a different 100 people and substituting linebackers for defensive backs produced the same result.

Wondering if “there was something unusual about the NFL QBs class of 2014,” they ran a third study using college quarterbacks from 20 random Division I schools. Again, the quarterbacks finished third.

The central question shifted. If quarterbacks are no better looking than their counterparts — and maybe even worse looking — then how did the position of quarterback get its leading-man image?
Wertheim and Sommers credit the halo effect, quoting economist Van Gilder as saying, “Socially, we’ve been trained to think that the quarterback is the most beautiful person on the team.”

They cite a study from the University of Michigan where two groups of students watched different videos of the same professor. In one, he “came across as warm and personable”; in the second, he “was scripted to come across much colder.”

Not only did those who watched the first video find the professor more likable, but they also gave higher scores to his nonverbal mannerisms, his French accent, and his physical attractiveness. “The friendly professor,” the authors write, “was rated as significantly better looking than the unfriendly professor. Even though they were the same guy.”

To test this effect, Wertheim and Sommers added a question to their photo array about the strength of the players’ leadership skills. The results were “pretty remarkable.”

They found that while quarterbacks may not cut it in terms of attractiveness, their faces had them rated the strongest leaders.

The authors conducted the survey again, this time dropping the attractiveness question and asking instead about leadership, intelligence, confidence, poise and social skill. Based on the photos alone, quarterbacks scored highest in all categories except confidence. And when combined into a comprehensive score of “perceived leadership quality, the quarterbacks’ superiority was statistically significant.”

‘Socially, we’ve been trained to think that the quarterback is the most beautiful person on the team.’

How was this so? For the answer, the authors turned to Nick Rule, “a psychologist who specializes in nonverbal behavior and appearance-related cues.”

“All of this has to do with our ability to perceive meaningful information from the social environment,” said Rule. “We’re constantly trying to evaluate whether something is going to be good or bad for us. Out of this has been born this ability to be really sensitive to all these little cues about how someone might behave toward us.”

Studies have produced similar results regarding the appearance of politicians. In one, people viewed head shots of congressional opponents for just one second each, then declared who they found “more competent.” Across more than 600 races, the House candidate picked as “more competent” won 67% of the time; in the Senate, 72%.

Rule said that not only has he seen similar results with corporate CEOs, but that facial appearance predicted how successful they were. “These perceptions scale with the amount of profit that a company makes,” he said.

Wertheim and Sommers, then, wanted to see if the results would be the same for quarterbacks and found that they were. Comparing the perceived leadership qualities they tested against actual results — “wins minus losses as a starter,” and their QB rating — they found that “our respondents ratings of a QB’s leadership qualities correlated positively — and statistically significantly — with both outcome variables. In other words, the more a QB looks like a leader, the more successful his actual track record tends to be.”

Why is this the case? The answer is a combination of two factors. For one, “We humans are surprisingly good at picking up the subtle facial and nonverbal cues that tell us something meaningful about other people’s social skills.”

Second, there’s the self-fulfilling prophecy factor, in that we are “surprisingly consistent in how we jump to conclusions about other people based on [their looks], and then we treat them in a way that brings out the tendencies we expect.”

“You’ve got a bunch of 8-year-olds on a football field,” says Rule. “At first, you’re arbitrarily picking who’s going to play where — mostly, it’s by body size. But for the ones who don’t clearly look like linemen, you’re going to pick the kid who seems like he’s the right one [to play quarterback].
Whether or not he does well at first, he gets plenty of practice being the quarterback. By high school he is a quarterback. And it goes on from there.”

Healthy Snacks Inspired by Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s Vacation Diet

Thanks to chef Allen Campbell, we now know for sure that Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen practice insanely healthy eating habits. Back in January, the couple’s Boston-based private chef revealed the 80 percent vegetable-based diet, which includes dishes like raw lasagna and green fruit roll-ups for the little ones. Brady even refuses to eat nightshades like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants because they are not anti-inflammatory.

Now the supermodel and Super Bowl champion’s traveling chef is speaking out on their vacation diet, which—surprise, surprise—is just as strict. Joanne Gerrard Young, a holistic nutritionist, raw food chef, and creator of The Healing Cuisine education program, has been preparing clean eats for the Bündchen-Brady family at their home in Costa Rica over the last five years. According to Young, she creates “an 80/20 raw diet, with big colorful salads and lots of fresh veggies.” Bündchen will often go on a juice cleanse while visiting Costa Rica, and, of course, there’s no dessert allowed, unless it’s of the vegan, raw kind.

On a typical vacation, indulgences, like the aforementioned dessert, are aplenty. It makes sense that two people whose jobs revolve around their bodies can’t take a break even when jetting off to the beach, but it’s rather unrealistic to think that you, a mere mortal, will cleanse your way through your next vacation. However, with spring break plans looming, there’s never harm in being more mindful of your food intake while traveling. Balance is key, and bringing a stock of healthy snacks will always help ease those holiday cravings.

Above, seven treats to pack in your suitcase for your spring break so you can get just a little taste of vacationing like Tom and Gisele.