Vinessa Antoine (Jordan)
Diet: “Overall, if my great-grandmother would not eat it, then I try to stay away from it. She grew her own food, never ate out of a can, didn’t eat fast food. Now, as a single mom, there are days where it’s like, ‘What can we get into our stomachs before the basketball game? If it’s edible, it’s good enough for me!’ But for breakfast, I like something hearty: oatmeal or a smoothie or a couple of eggs — something that will fill me up. In my smoothies, I do frozen bananas to get the consistency right, almond milk, some type of yogurt, and frozen berries and a scoop of protein [powder]. I try to sneak in some greens, like a handful of spinach so that I don’t really taste it. For lunch, I try to keep it balanced. I’ll do a turkey burger with a salad, or a salad with protein of some sort. For dinner, I’ve been getting into salmon; I’ll season up some Trader Joe’s sockeye salmon and grill it with some sweet potatoes or brown rice.”
Fitness: “I was working out every day for a while. For me, it goes in ebbs and flows. Some weeks, I work out every day but Sunday, and others, I’ll get busy and I won’t work out at all. I joined a gym and do basic Stairmaster [exercises] and weights, but when things get hectic, I don’t go as often. I notice the change in my body; when I was really, really fit, I was doing spinning three days a week and Pilates two days a week and there was a drastic change in a month when I fell off that schedule. I was going to SoulCycle, but it’s expensive, for sure, and I cut back on it. This sounds kind of corny, but when I first started working out after I stopped dancing [professionally], I got an old-school Jane Fonda workout tape from the ’80s and it worked really, really well. It was challenging! Between YouTube and all the exercise DVDs you can order online for under $20, it’s very easy to pop in a DVD, move your coffee table over, throw down a yoga mat and get 15, 20 or 30 minutes in. Doing it for 15 to 30 minutes in the comfort of your own home and jumping in the shower after, you feel like, ‘Okay, that’s a start!’ ”
Vinessa’s Top Three Tips
• “I noticed a huge difference in my body when I cut out coffee, soda and juice drinks and replaced them with water. Replacing all your liquids with water changes things drastically, almost like it jump-starts the body into detoxing.”
• “There’s nothing wrong with starting out small, like replacing one of your normal meals with a big, fat salad. When you notice, ‘Wow, I feel better, I sleep better,’ you’ll be more inclined to make other healthy choices, like, ‘You know what? I’ll take the stairs.’ ”
• “Squats are a great exercise and you can do them while you’re watching TV. Just bend up and down! It gets your thigh and butt area feeling tighter.”
Hayley Erin (Kiki)
Diet: “I don’t count calories and I don’t necessarily try to eat healthy all the time, but I do try to be as good as I can so that I don’t feel bad when I do eat something unhealthy. I love yogurt and I’m really into the Chobani Flip, which is yogurt on one side and pear honey on the other. I’ll have one of those for breakfast and a cup of tea and maybe something like an all-natural LÄRABAR. That will tide me over for a while. For a snack, I’ll eat coconut chips. For lunch, I try to eat something like a salad, something fresh, but a lot of time, if I’m going to work, I’ll grab a frozen meal, like the all-natural frozen meals from Amy’s Organic, which I get at Target. I eat Trader Joe’s premade salads; my favorite is the spicy chicken noodle salad. If I make my own salad, I’ll do lettuce, orzo or a grain, some spinach, some olives, some cucumbers. I cut out red meat and I try not to eat a lot of poultry; I prefer fish. So I’ll put some tuna or hard-boiled egg in the salad, too, and oil and vinegar for dressing. For dinner, my boyfriend and I eat a lot of barbecue chicken, and if I’ve been eating carbs earlier in the day, I’ll crave something fresh, be it vegetables or fruit.”
Fitness: “I was really bad about exercising for a really long time, so I picked up Pilates, which I didn’t expect to love as much as I do. It’s not easy! My body hurt everywhere when I started. It’s a full-body workout, but you’re pretty much lying down all the time, which is totally my speed [laughs]. I try to go twice a week. Logan [her beau] and I ride our bikes everywhere and it’s the kind of exercise where you don’t even realize you’re exercising, because you’re having a good time. I also go swimming, which is definitely hard work. My focus is on feeling good, not on my appearance — but that said, I feel like I look better since I’ve been exercising.”
Hayley’s Top Three Tips
• “Once you make exercise a habit, it becomes easier and easier to keep up with it.”
•“Don’t ruin it for yourself by starting off with more than you can handle and thinking, ‘Oh, I need to get in shape, so I’m going to crash diet and go to the gym four times this week and run four miles.’ Ease your way into working out.”
•“I had an epiphany: If you don’t buy it, then you can’t eat it. When I’m at the market, I try to think ahead to when I’m sitting at home and the choices I’ll be making then. So, I try to buy things that are individually packaged, like 100-calorie snack packs, or popsicles instead of a tub of ice cream.”
