Alessandra Ambrosio Explains How Motherhood Impacted Her Body and Modeling Decisions

Supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio shows off her bangin' body on the cover of The Edit! Ambrosio has given birth to two kids, but her body is hotter than ever. What's her secret?

She told the mag, "Your body will never go back to exactly what it was before pregnancy, whatever people tell you. It can't. But I think I have a better body now than before I had kids. It's partly because I work out, whereas before I didn't, but also to do with the shape – it just looks more formed now and I feel better about it than I did. Not that it was easy getting back into shape post-pregnancy: after having Anja I only had three months to lose all the weight [before doing the 2008 Victoria's Secret show] and I was on this 1200-calorie-a-day meal-delivery service that I hated. I couldn't do that again.”

Alessandra has stripped down to just lingerie for countless Victoria's Secret catalogues over the years, but having kids changed her outlook on the shoots. She explained, “I used to be 100% comfortable on lingerie shoots – then I had a child, and it was more of a mental shift than anything else. Somehow it felt a bit weirder to be in lingerie once I was a mum. Although I did that cover for Maxim last year [naked but for a strategically placed newspaper], you don't see anything. When my daughter [Anja, now seven] saw it, she asked, 'Mummy, why do you have no clothes on?' And I said, 'Mummy actually has a G-string on – it's just so small you can't see it.'”

Ambrosio has become a well-known face in the modeling world, but does she have thoughts on retirement? She shared, “I started modeling at a very young age, and thought it would all end by the time I was 20; now I'm almost 35 and coming up to my 20th year in the industry. Although there might eventually come a time when I want to focus on other areas in my life, if I manage to keep going until I'm 50, like Cindy [Crawford], then great. You might die tomorrow, after all, so why make decisions about what you will and won't do now?”