Here we sit, Denver, in front of the TV, mopping up the last of the gravy with our final bite of leftover turkey. For dessert, we have two, okay, three of our first batch of holiday cookies and maybe even a mug of hot chocolate. We put our empty plates down on the coffee table and slump back into the couch cushions to ride out our food comas just in time for, with a glorious amount of glitter, feathers and pinkness, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
Do they do it on purpose? These Angels, they drift down from the land of zero-calorie Thanksgiving to that sparkling stage in their Swarovski-studded lingerie, and they flit and float around Nicki Minaj, while we gape at their beautifully toned bodies and wipe the whipped cream off our faces. The only things decorating my bra are sprinkles from the gingerbread man I just devoured.
My Facebook News Feed told me that twenty-four of my friends had mentioned the show in their statuses. After scanning a few of them, I was not surprised that nobody said anything about the bras or skivvies, but every single one of them said something about how smokin’ these chicks are. One guy said (he was joking because I’m not friends with anyone this douche-y for real): “Watching my first VS Fashion Show in HD. Ladies, pay attention. This is how you’re supposed to look.”
So, how do they get runway ready? I’ll give these lovely ladies a little more credit and assume it’s more than just good genes. Some sources, like The Huffington Post, whose words you can take with a grain of salt, tell us about the extreme aspects of an Angel’s eating and workout regimen. She works out every day with a trainer, and then twice a day for the last three weeks leading up to the show. She also sees a nutritionist and is prescribed protein shakes, vitamins and supplements, based on her body’s muscle mass and fat ratio, to keep her energy levels up. She’ll drink a gallon of water a day, and for nine days before the show, she’ll drink only protein shakes. Twelve hours before the show, the Angel doesn’t eat or drink at all. Yikes.
Obviously, I love food, and I could never swap a side dish where eighty-nine per cent of its ingredients are breads (stuffing is one of life’s best inventions) for a protein shake. I believe in maintaining your body, rather than being extreme with it when it comes to getting and staying fit. The VS All-Access website shows video clips of some of these Angels working it out. I particularly like Candice Swanepoel’s way to fitness, which focuses on stability and balance. She does a lot of work with resistance bands, which she holds on to—instead of something secure, like a chair back—while she does leg lifts to the front, side and back. She also uses plastic disks that look like the ones you put under the legs of a couch for easy moving. Candice gets in plank position, puts her toes on the disks and does mountain climbers. The disks make sure her legs move all the time and she doesn’t have a way to relax her muscles because she doesn’t have the friction between her shoes and the floor. It’s constant control of her body.
Making it a goal of mine to get a body like a Victoria’s Secret model isn’t necessarily a bad one, but if the liquid diet and two workouts a day regimen is that crucial to looking so perfect on the runway, it isn’t a realistic one. For most of us, it isn’t our job to work out every day and the very reason we do it is to look and feel fabulous. We eat right so we have the energy to ski all day. We work out so we can run the St. Jude’s Marathon. We don’t do any of that just to walk up the runway in high heels. If we can’t have bodies exactly like Angels, we can at least strip down, don a pair of sparkly wings from Halloween and run around our living room before snuggling up to watch the show. With a second helping of dessert.