Carol Alt in the raw

The supermodel exposes the secret to a healthy life

supermodels of all time, Alt is an ardent advocate of the raw-food diet and has decided the best way to demonstrate its benefits is with a body of evidence—her own. "All my professional life I have ' been showing clothes," she says. "Now I'm showing me." So put down that frying pan, step away from the stove and listen to what the lady has to say. Alt—48 and simply stunning—came to raw food about 14 years ago, when a career that had so far seen her on more than 600 magazine covers seemed close to ending. "I was done at 34, barely hanging on at 35, and I probably would have been dead at 40," she says. The physical changes most people undergo during their 30s were landing heavily on a person who earned her living under the scrutiny of a Hasselblad. "I was gaining weight, getting fine lines and wrinkles, feeling bloated and puffy," she says. However, it wasn't just aging: She was also having trouble sleeping and suffered from chronic colds, acid stomach, allergies, sinus headaches and dry skin—a whole set of conditions that not only leave a person feeling awful but disqualify her from the cover of Vogue. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result," says Alt. "I was five-foot-10 and weighed 165 pounds when I started modeling, and I had been starving

myself to be 125 pounds, sometimes 115 pounds, since I was 18 years old. I was hungry, and because I was hungry my body was breaking down. When I consulted the doctor who specialized in the raw-food diet, he had one piece of advice: Eat." But eat raw.

(Science teachers of America, please tell your students it is possible that one day a supermodel will lean across a res­taurant table, look into your eyes and say, "Do you remember your chemistry from high school?" If it happened to me, it can happen to them.)

"Enzymes," says Alt, explaining the secret of raw food. She says the body needs enzymes, which come from food, but cooking causes them to break down, which sets us up for illnesses great and small. To arrest this process, learn to eat raw.

Which is not as hard as it may seem. "Raw food is everywhere," says Alt. "You can do 75 percent of your diet without a struggle. Start with carpaccio, tartare, sashimi. Seared foods. Almost all the dairy you eat has a raw cousin." Indeed, right in front of us in the sunny Peruvian sushi restaurant in Greenwich Village where we're eating, Alt has summoned a banquet of skewered cod, tuna ceviche and salmon sashimi—as light and flavor­ful a lunch as you could imagine. Alt is an impressive companion, starting with the stunning looks, her command of the menu and her fluency with nutritional science, all topped off with an amaz­ing biography that has names like Bob Fosse, Howard Stern and Donald Trump studding her stories. But Alt, raised on Long Island, the daughter of a South Bronx fire chief and a housewife who herself was once a showroom model, seems rather matter-of-fact about her accomplishments. "I never believed I was beautiful," she says and then laughs. "I remember working in Florida with Renee Simonsen, who was going out with the guy from Duran Duran who is now mar­ried to the girl from Juicy Couture. We were walking in a mall, and her with her blonde hair and oversize features and the way she walked—people literally stopped dead to look at her. I was like the redheaded stepchild."

But Alt turns up the enthusiasm when she raves about raw. "I feel better today than at 24. I look better. My skin looks better. I'm more chiseled." It's these changes that have led a woman who says "I never stood up for anything" to become more vocal. "I believe God wants me to speak about this—I'm a born-again Christian, more or less— and I needed a platform, which is why I'm in playboy. Nobody loves the female form like playboy, and there's no bet­ter way to show women you don't have to live with getting old."

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CAROL

(continued from page 142) Looking better, feeling better, Alt also reports she's more active. "My energy is up all the time," she says, a good thing for a woman constantly on the go. She travels the world on modeling assignments, has an award-winning acting career in Europe and is launching a line of completely raw, chemical-free skin-care products on HSN. (Alt happily points out that she has had no face-lifts and seldom wears makeup.) She had a more than respectable third-place finish earlier this year on The Celeb­rity Apprentice, and she has just published her first novel, This Year's Model. The crit­ics have been complimentary: "It brings high fashion's hautest mannequins to life," enthused the New York Daily News. As with her pictorial in playboy, Alt aims to accomplish some good with her book and hopes aspiring models will learn some lessons from her tale. "I'm tired of watching these poor young girls get used and abused by photographers and agents," she says. "They have to wise up. They need to know that girls came before them and lots of girls will come after them and that if they treat it like a business, they can have a career."

"I always was a worker bee," she says. "1 wasn't the best-looking girl in the busi­ness, and I didn't have the best body—Elle Macpherson did. But it is a business, and I treated it like one. I remember John Casa-blancas said to Patrick Demarchelier, 'Why do you work with Carol? She's no fun; she doesn't party.' Patrick said, 'It's because I know when I book Carol I will get the job

done.'" It's revealing to learn the disci­plined Alt almost didn't become a model; at the same time her career took off she was awarded an ROTC scholarship to pursue a pre-law major at Hofstra. "1 was faced with a huge decision," she recalls. "I had been bat­tling for the scholarship. They didn't want to give it to a woman—to the extent that, the year before, they had given it to a guy who was less qualified than I was. And my family wanted me to stay in school. But the agency said, 'You're out of your mind! You're work­ing every day. Why would you want to give this up?' To me it was just a summer job, but I decided to give it a try." No doubt it was the right decision: Think of all the soldiers who would have hazarded a court-martial just to be prosecuted by Colonel Alt.

Having once been married to former New York Ranger Ron Greschner, Alt is currently in a long-term relationship with Alexei Yashin, the former NHL star who now plays for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl in the Continental Hockey League in his native Russia. Yashin is 13 years Alt's junior, and yes, she says raw food helps keep them together. "I have to keep up with all those women who are 13 years younger," she says. "Those Russian women are gor­geous." Although being apart is difficult, Alt understands why Yashin continues to play. "It's not about the money. It's about what you've set as your goal. He doesn't feel he has reached it. I don't feel I have, either. There's always something else I want to do. It's a big question: What are you going to do with the rest of your life? I eat raw—I'm going to be around for a long time." ^^

Alt has worked with the greatest photographers of her era, but she doesn't really have a favorite. "It's easy to say that Horst was fabulous or that Irving Penn was amazing or that being in Patrick Demarchelier's studio was wonderful. But what I like is a pho­tographer who loves what he does. When that kind of person gets behind the camera, he is completely transformed because he loves his work. And it's the same with any man. If he loves what he's doing, the average joe becomes gorgeous. That's how you get those situations when you see a beautiful woman and an average guy and you ask, How did he get her?"