Gisele Bündchen quietly stopped drinking more than two years ago, and now she’s being vocal about how much it improved her life, speaking to People about when and why she gave up alcohol.
“Right after I turned 40, actually, I felt a huge difference between when I had the glass of wine and when I didn’t have the glass of wine,” she began. “It’s socially accepted to have a glass of wine. And people even say, ‘Oh, it’s healthy for you.’ Well, it is not healthy for me. If you want to ask of your body what I ask of my body, which is a lot, I can’t be having all these things (alcohol, caffeine) because they add up.”
The model added that she felt an immediate shift in her every day life when she stopping drinking: “I became more clear. I felt a bit more foggy before. Now I’m very sharp and very present, and I notice things that I didn’t notice before. When I’m not drinking, I’m sleeping much better. You have to be loving to yourself. You ask a lot of your body, you’ve got to do a reset. You have got to take care of this only vehicle you got, right?”
Gisele Bündchen on September 15.
Bündchen is not the only celebrity this year who has spoken openly about giving up alcohol. Bella Hadid celebrated approaching 10 months of sobriety in July. “With Kin and lots of self love, I am almost 10 months no alcohol!” she wrote on Instagram. “I’m so proud of anyone discovering their sobriety Or anyone who has had the courage to open their mind to Dry July!”
Hadid spoke to InStyle in January 2022 about what led her to reduce and, ultimately, eliminate alcohol from her life. “I have done my fair share of drinking,” she said. “I loved alcohol, and it got to the point where even I started to, you know, cancel nights out that I felt like I wouldn’t be able to control myself.”
She revealed that once she saw brain scans from her doctor of alcohol’s effect on her brain, it became “a lot harder to pick up the glass.”
“I don’t feel the need, because I know how it will affect me at three in the morning when I wake up with horrible anxiety thinking about that one thing I said five years ago when I graduated high school,” she said. “There’s just this never-ending effect of, essentially, you know, pain and stress over those few drinks that didn’t really do much, you know?”
Senior News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.