One major career milestone for many young models is appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated in swimwear. Kate Upton did it. Tyra Banks did it. Brooklyn Decker did it. The list goes on and on. Former model and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi recently joined the list of stars who got in shape for the Swimsuit Edition of the magazine. Yet, at 52 she’s much older than many of the names on the list, and she recently admitted she thought it was something that would have happened earlier in her career.
While the Top Chef host knows her way around a bikini, she revealed in a recent interview while promoting Taste The Nation that she thought it was a joke when her publicist called to reveal the news.
I was like, ’No, you’re shitting me.’ Literally I was like, ‘That’s not true, it’s so surreal,’ I thought it would happen one day for me when I was in my 20s and 30s and a model, but it never did, so I really thought that ship had sailed. So it’s almost sweeter happening at this age.
That ship most certainly hadn’t sailed, however, despite what she told Page Six. In fact, the magazine put Lakshmi in an underboob-baring and very memorable gold bikini for the 2023 issue, among other looks. She later shared behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot, and admitted she “wouldn’t go back to” her twenties if you “paid [her] all the money in the world.”
Fashion photography YuTsai shot the model for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition Shoot. She looked great on the day of, but she said that was partially luck, as she was only given three weeks to get ready for the shoot. The good news is she was already hitting the gym hard after the most recent World All Stars season of Top Chef had wrapped.
Luckily I was trying to lose the weight from Top Chef so I was in the gym a lot. But I only had 3 weeks’ notice. It was surreal.
Lakshmi seems to enjoy her work on Top Chef and other projects like Taste The Nation, but they do come with a caveat: weight gain. In the past, the host penned an essay for THR in which she admitted she gains 10-17 pounds every season and then spends an additional 12 weeks working off what took her six weeks to pack on while the show was filming. She has a “poem” for her weight loss which goes like “no meat, no wheat, no cheese, no fried foods or sweets. And, of course, no alcohol.”
I guess that naked bathtub pasta post came in between one of these diets.
Ultimately, the work she puts in both on and offscreen has paid off for her in spades. At 52, she’s hit a career milestone she thought had passed her by. It’s part of a push SI has made in recent years to promote body positivity, even with its infamous bikini posts. In recent years, we’ve seen more women with different body types and of different ages in the magazine, including major names Ashley Graham and Christie Brinkley rocking swimwear. And now Padma Lakshmi too.
