Even though she is pregnant with her second child right now, Blake Lively is already an inspiration when it comes to dropping the baby weight.
The 28-year-old actress began filming her bikini-clad surfer role in the shark thriller The Shallows only eight months after giving birth to daughter James. And while she and her trainer have spoken previously about her rigorous diet and training routine, Lively still has secrets to spill.
In a telephone interview Tuesday with Australian radio hosts Kyle and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson, Lively admitted that her intense diet included no soy.
“I did no gluten and no soy,” she said. “Once you remove soy, you realize you’re eating no processed foods. So that’s basically what I did. No processed foods and then working out.”
Lively explained that removing soy was the most challenging part of the process.
“[It] seems like, ‘Oh, that’s really easy to cut that out,’ but then you realize, there’s soy in everything,” she said. “Like, everything you eat, there is soy in it. Even if it’s healthy, Whole Foods-organic stuff, there’s always soy in it.”
“Just try no soy and no gluten and watch how hard that is,” she added.
But just because Lively was steering clear of processed foods didn’t mean she was going hungry. Despite having a rigorous diet, she found herself eating well.
Said Lively: “I was still able to have sugar and all of those things. It’s all in moderation. You just have a balance of protein, carbs, and vegetables. And it wasn’t the worst. Like, I was eating rice and sushi.”
There was one downside though – not being able to enjoy the food the cast and crew were enjoying on The Shallows set.
“That was the hardest part,” Lively admitted. “They were making these fresh muffins every morning – those jackasses. They smelled so good!”
Previously, Lively’s trainer, Don Saladino, told WHO how he got Lively in shape for the beachside shoot in just two months.
To supplements her almost daily workouts, Lively was eating four small meals a day – which she planned with the consultation of a nutritionist.
“We made sure that her meals were well-balanced,” he said. “She had a protein, a vegetable and a slow-burning carb. We tried to give her enough so that she wasn’t stuffed, but she was comfortable.”
Of course, that “slow-burning carb” was gluten-free – usually sweet potatoes, gluten-free oatmeal and white rice. “This is not training a fitness competitor or a model,” Saladino said. “This is about feeding a woman who’s got a child who’s got to have certain nutrients in her body. She’s got to take care of herself. She’s got to eat healthy. The way that we did it was the right way, and it wasn’t through starving her.”
For what it’s worth, Lively said she never wanted to get in shape because she was ashamed of her body.
“After I had a kid I thought, ‘Okay, this is what my body looks like. This is amazing – I earned this body,’ ” she told Kyle and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson. “‘And it’s not as good as it was before I had a kid, but, oh well.’ “
Still, to see herself so fit after the “trainwreck” of childbirth was encouraging for Lively.
“I’ve never been in that great a shape in my whole life,” she said. “So to do it after having a kid was actually really nice. Because you see your body after having a kid and it’s beautiful because you just gave birth, but it’s also ‘Oh my god, this is not what my body looks like.’ You feel like you’re never going to get your body back again.”
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