Top Chef‘s Padma Lakshmi Dishes With VIVmag

"Top Chef" host Padma Lakshmi stays in shape with a variety of cardio and weight training. "I don't feel guilty about any of the food I consume," she says.

If we could trade places with any TV host, we’d want to be 39-year-old Padma Lakshmi. A co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America, she’s smart, gorgeous and, as the host of Bravo’s Top Chef, she gets to eat fabulous food for a living. “I’m an omnivore. I have a great curiosity about food,” she tells us. “Food makes me happy, which is why I’m very well equipped to do the job that I do.”

That’s not to say there aren’t downsides to her show-mandated feasting. The deep-dish pizza challenge last season proved to be a stomach-assaulting bread overload. And she does gain weight — about 10–15 pounds per season. “It would be ridiculous if I didn’t. We have two different dress sizes for me,” confesses Lakshmi, who works off the extra pounds with boxing, jumping rope, stair running and weight training. “As women get older, we lose muscle mass, and so we need to lift a lot more weight than people realize,” she notes.

Although she says she loves a good restaurant hamburger and in her travels searches out hole-in-the-wall delis and barbecue joints, Lakshmi says she’s an advocate of home cooking. “Studies have shown that the more you cook your own food, the more healthy you’ll be,” she says. “And you have to eat a lot more vegetal food. You don’t need that much meat to survive.”

No doubt Lakshmi — who recently announced that she’s eating for two — will walk away with some veggie-based recipes after tonight’s much-buzzed-about challenge with vegan activist Natalie Portman. Have you tried Top Chef’s recipes? Were they as delicious as they looked?

Photo credit: Trae Patton/Bravo

Tags: activist, Bravo, Chef, co-founder, Endometriosis Foundation of America, fabulous food, food, Food reality television series, Hospitality/Recreation, Human Interest, Lakshmi, Natalie Portman, Padma Lakshmi, Series, Television, Top Chef, TV host, vegetal food