Body image activist and supermodel, Tyra Banks – in a new episode of Harper’s Bazaar’s Food Diaries YouTube series– lists the food she eats on a typical day. The 46-year-old reveals that she is now 25 pounds heavier than she was when she appeared on the cover of “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit” back in 2019.
Banks’ Relationship with Food
The former America’s Next Top Model host declared in a clip she recently posted: “I have a very interesting relationship with food. I have to say that it is one of the most important things in my life.
“A lot of my personal life, and the things that I like to do and my hobby is food: finding new restaurants, doing a challenge where I can’t go to the same restaurant again for six months, finding food festivals. I love a supper club. It is a true, very important thing for me.”
Banks added: “Right now, you can’t tell because I have on a men’s blazer, but I am 25 pounds heavier than I was on the cover of a very famous swimsuit magazine that came out last year”.
The entrepreneur and activist quipped, “When you are tired, and you are working hard, you just go to this fast food, this fast food, and this fast food and you compare the burgers. So, I am 30 pounds heavier, and the weight will come off one day, but not today!”
Banks: The First Black Woman to Grace SI Swimsuit
Last year, the model-turned-business mogul returned to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, more than twenty years after being the first black woman in history to grace the cover of the illustrious magazine alone in 1997.
That appearance on SI Swimsuit was Banks’ third cover whose modeling career was launched when she first appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit in 1996 alongside model Valeria Mazza just before she landed the extraordinary solo cover about a year later.
Banks Desire to Recreate the Polka Dot Bikini Moment
The famous model had wanted to create her well-known polka dot bikini moment anew. But she was, however, honest and open about how much weight she had gained since the celebrated photoshoot that took the world by storm in 1997.
“We could not find the exact one in the archives,” Banks said at the time. “It was the polka dot bikini, so we recreated that bikini. I recreate it, i.e. the shoot 25 pounds heavier.”
Since she launched her modeling career, Banks has been a prominent body image activist in the fashion world. She is known for starting the conversation about unrealistic standards in the fashion industry more than a decade ago.”
“I am happy that the fashion industry is finally catching up,” the modeling star said in an interview. “What I am hoping for is that the Gigi Hadid’s, the Ashley Graham’s, and everyone else is just models. Not plus, not short, not trans, not curvy. I just want to be normal.”
