Supermodel Kathy Ireland’s Weight Battle - Hot to Fat to HOTTER

Last December, former supermodel Kathy Ireland was indulging in one of her favorite pastimes at home in Santa Barbara: baking cookies. At the same time, her 14-year-old son Erik was running around the house snapping photos when he captured a candid of his mom that made him snicker. “I said, ‘What’s so funny?’ And he said ‘Mom, you look pregnant!’ 

Ready to dismiss the comment as typical teen exaggeration, she took a peek. “I didn’t recognize the person I saw,” Ireland confesses. “What I saw was someone who looked overwhelmed, overstressed, overweight, over-everything.”

But rather than hit delete, Ireland — the 5′10″ model whose killer body and piercing green eyes graced the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue three times between 1989 and 1994 — decided it was time to get her body back under control. “I wasn’t going to destroy the picture and pretend this isn’t true,” she says.

By candidly talking about her 25-lb. weight gain, Ireland, 46, wants to send a message to all mothers that, yes, even a former supermodel deals with the battle of the bulge. “I was just not making enough time to take care of me."

Ireland never intended to lose her way. The weight crept up incrementally. Once she hit her 40s, “things changed, and so did my body,” says Ireland, who has grown her business into a $1.4 billion design empire that now includes furniture, flooring, lighting, jewelry, skin care and apparel. “As my career expanded, so did my waistline.”