In 1999 Naomi Campbell gave Playboy an insight into how she stayed looking so fabulous. “I never diet. I smoke. I drink now and then. I never work out. I work very hard and I am worth every cent,” the magazine quoted her as saying.
Eleven years and a Russian oligarch boyfriend later it seems that her attitude to staying in shape has shifted slightly. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, broadcast yesterday, the model shared her devotion to a diet involving drinking a cocktail of Maple syrup, cayenne pepper, lemon juice and water and eating nothing else.
“I try to do [this] three times a year … The most I’ve ever done it for is 18 days. So I started on Sunday. This is my sixth day,” said a Lycra-clad Campbell in a video demonstrating her workout routine. She added: “It’s good just to clean out your body once in a while.”
She also shared another beauty tip for would-be supermodels: skipping. “The rope is great for your face; you lose a lot on your face when you do the rope,” she said.
Campbell revealed that Vladislav Doronin, her “fitness guru” partner for the past two years, provided her with unfailing support when it comes to resisting food. “If there is bread on the table, he’s like, ‘don’t eat bread,'” she said, gazing at Doronin, who smiled from the front row of the audience during the interview.
Campbell is not the first model to extol the benefits of periodic dieting . Kate Moss recently admitted that one of her mottos was: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” – a phrase often used as “thinspiration” by pro-Ana groups, which promote anorexia as a lifestyle choice.
Actor Gwyneth Paltrow told subscribers of her Goop newsletter (which urges readers to “nourish the inner aspect”) that she likes to “do fasts and detoxes a couple of times during the year”, adding that the most extreme fast she had done was Campbell’s lemonade diet. “It was not what you would characterise as pretty. Or easy. It did work, however,” she wrote.
Other celebrities have also recently shared the secrets of their physiques. Cheryl Cole told Hello! magazine about her new diet which involves eating food according to your blood type. The singer and X Factor judge strictly adheres to the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” plan, claiming it has made a huge difference to her energy levels. “Before, I was like ‘energy schmenergy’ and didn’t believe it. But now I believe it 100%,” she told the magazine.
During the Winfrey interview Campbell not only spoke of her beauty regime, but also her famously short fuse.
She said she was not a “petulant diva” who saw red when she could not get her own way. On the contrary, she said her anger management issues occurred when people abused her trust, and stemmed from the sense of abandonment she felt as a child.
“It comes from another type of emotional disorder because it’s not just, if I don’t get what I want I throw a fit … It comes from an abandonment issue and also from trying to just build up a family around me that’s not my immediate family. If I feel a mistrust, then … all my cards go down,” she said. The model attempted to set the record straight about a recent altercation with ABC News, when she stormed out of an interview after being questioned about a “blood diamond” she allegedly received from former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. It is a claim she denies.
Taylor is on trial at The Hague on charges of war crimes, including arming and instructing rebels during Sierra Leone’s civil war in order to gain control of its diamond fields. Discussing the matter in a calmer fashionlast night, Campbell said it was not her fault she found herself at the same dinner as the dictator. It was held by Nelson Mandela, the man she has described as her adopted grandfather.
“He [Taylor] wasn’t invited,” said Campbell. “He wasn’t part of our group, but he did show up. We understood that after it was explained to us.”
Campbell, who pushed a camera aside as she left the ABC interview, told Winfrey that a sound effect had been added to the channel’s news reports on the incident – a claim ABC categorically denies.
• This article was amended on 5 May 2010. Due to an editing change, the original article referred to Vladimir Doronin. This has been corrected
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