Josephine Skriver Diet and Nutrition: The Secret to Her Supermodel Physique

Josephine Skriver eats more than people expect. That has been the consistent thread in every interview she has given about food for the past ten years, from her early Harper's Bazaar sit-downs around 2015 to the Strong book she released with celebrity trainer Anna Kaiser in 2020 and the cooking videos she has been posting from her Nashville kitchen since marrying The Cab frontman Alexander DeLeon in 2022. Her plan reads less like a diet and more like a working routine, built around the demands of a Victoria's Secret Angel contract, kept after the 2018 cancellation, and adapted again when she moved out of Manhattan full-time.

This piece walks through what she eats, the specific nutritionists and trainers who shaped the framework, and how the plan changed across the three phases of her career.

The Copenhagen baseline

Skriver grew up in Copenhagen as the daughter of Niels Mark and Jorgen Lergaard, the first openly gay parents in Denmark to use IVF and surrogacy. Her family ate the way most Copenhagen households did in the 1990s and early 2000s: rye bread for breakfast, fish three or four times a week, root vegetables roasted with butter, dark coffee, and the seasonal habits Scandinavian cooking has carried for generations. Berries in summer, root cellars in winter, herring at lunch when grandmother was visiting.

That baseline matters because she still cooks from it. The smorrebrod she posts on Instagram, the rye-and-mackerel lunches she packs when traveling, the rugbrod-with-skyr breakfasts she eats most mornings when she is at home in Nashville. All of it sits inside the Danish habit pattern she has never replaced. When American interviewers ask about her diet, she usually starts with this. The protein-and-greens plans came later, layered on top.

She has been with IMG Models since the 2008 Unique Models Copenhagen discovery, but did not move to New York full-time until 2013, after the Victoria's Secret debut in November of that year. The Danish baseline was already set by then.

The Angel-era framework (2013-2018)

Charles Passler is the nutritionist most often associated with the Victoria's Secret Angels cohort of the 2010s. He worked with Adriana Lima, Candice Swanepoel, and Jasmine Tookes through the same period, and Skriver has named him in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue interviews as the person who put together her show-prep plan in the months before the November Fashion Show. The framework is well documented:

• Lean protein at every meal: chicken breast, white fish, turkey, occasional grass-fed beef
• Two cups of leafy greens with lunch and dinner
• One small starch serving at lunch (sweet potato, quinoa, sometimes brown rice)
• Healthy fats from avocado, raw almonds, and olive oil
• No dairy, no gluten, no alcohol in the final eight weeks before the show
• Two liters of water per day, often with lemon

Skriver has been clear in interviews that she never went on the more severe Passler protocols. She did not do the low-carb cycling some of the other Angels did. She did not cut salt the week of the show. What she did, instead, was eat the basic framework above on a steady rhythm for most of the year and tighten the portion sizes in the six weeks before the November shoot dates and the fashion show itself.

The training side ran in parallel. Anna Kaiser, who runs the AKT InMotion studio chain in New York, was the trainer Skriver worked with from roughly 2013 onward. AKT combines dance cardio, resistance band work, and targeted strength, and the Skriver-Kaiser collaboration eventually produced the Strong: A Runner's Guide to Boosting Performance with Strength Training book in 2020. The fuel side of that book (what she ate around training sessions) is the closest thing to a published Skriver meal plan that exists.

For the wider Skriver career picture, our Josephine Skriver fashion campaigns profile covers the working calendar the eating plan sat inside.

A representative Angel-era day

The combination of the published Strong meal templates and the interviews Skriver gave to Women's Health, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar between 2015 and 2018 produces a fairly consistent picture of a representative day in the Angel-era register:

Breakfast was usually two scrambled eggs with spinach and avocado, half a grapefruit, and black coffee. On training mornings, she would add a piece of rye toast.

Mid-morning brought a green smoothie with spinach, banana, almond milk, and one scoop of plant-based protein powder. Sometimes a Vital Proteins collagen scoop went in.

Lunch was grilled chicken or salmon with a large salad (mixed greens, cucumber, tomato, red onion, olive oil, lemon) and half a sweet potato.

Afternoon snacks were raw almonds, an apple, occasionally a Quest protein bar when traveling.

Dinner was white fish (cod, sole, or branzino) with steamed broccoli, asparagus, and quinoa. When the show was close, the version got leaner: fish with greens, no starch.

Hydration ran across two to three liters of water a day, hot lemon water on waking, and green tea in the afternoon.

That rhythm held from roughly 2013 to 2018. It was specifically a Victoria's Secret Angel show-prep framework, built around a calendar that peaked every November.

The post-2018 reset

When the Fashion Show was cancelled in November 2019 and the broader Victoria's Secret model contract structure was restructured, Skriver kept the basic Anna Kaiser training cadence but softened the food side. She has talked about this directly in podcast interviews, particularly the On Purpose episode and the Skinny Confidential appearance from 2021: she stopped doing the eight-week show-prep tightening, she added more carbohydrates, she let dairy back in (yogurt, mostly, and occasional cheese), and she made room for the Danish rye-and-mackerel comfort meals she had been minimizing through the Angel years.

The 2020 JoJa Activewear brand-co-founding with Jasmine Tookes brought a different kind of pressure into the routine. The brand wanted both founders visible in workout content year-round, not just in November. Skriver adapted by training more consistently and eating a slightly higher-calorie, higher-carb framework that supported it. She talks about this on the JoJa Instagram channel, particularly in the Q&A sessions she has done with Tookes since 2021.

The Nashville-and-Manhattan rotation

After the 2022 marriage to Alexander DeLeon and the move into a Nashville home base, Skriver started cooking more. The Instagram cooking content from the past three years includes a recognizable rotation: sheet-pan salmon with root vegetables, a Nashville-adapted skyr-and-berries breakfast bowl, the Danish meatballs (frikadeller) her mother taught her, fish tacos on Sundays, and a recurring sweet-potato-and-black-bean bowl that turns up most weeks.

She still travels to New York for AKT sessions when she is in town. She still works with Charles Passler intermittently, mostly before major campaign shoots. The framework has loosened, but the core habits have held: protein with every meal, large vegetable portions, water, the Scandinavian rye-and-fish anchors.

The third pregnancy is not a public fact at the time of writing, but the cooking content from 2024 and 2025 has visibly shifted toward iron-rich foods (red meat once a week, dark leafy greens, lentils) and away from the strict Angel-era avoidances. Whether that signals a phase change in life or just a phase change in cooking interest, it is part of how the framework has evolved.

What the framework shares with the other Angels

From the outside, the Passler-built Victoria's Secret Angel eating frameworks of the mid-2010s all looked broadly similar (lean protein, greens, lemon water, fish more than red meat, almonds for snacks), but the individual adaptations diverged in interesting ways.

Adriana Lima trained as a boxer and ate accordingly: more red meat, more salt, the fighter's emphasis on protein and complex carbohydrates around heavy training. Candice Swanepoel skewed Brazilian-and-South-African: fish, rice, beans, the family recipes she still cooks with sons Anacã and Ariel. Jasmine Tookes runs Anna Kaiser AKT alongside Skriver and eats a Californian-Ecuadorian rotation through husband Juan David Borrero's family kitchen. Elsa Hosk leans Scandinavian and minimalist, similar to Skriver but lower in protein and higher in vegetable volume. Behati Prinsloo eats the Namibian fish-and-fresh-produce framework she grew up with in Henties Bay.

The Skriver version is recognizably Danish-with-New-York-overlay. The rye-and-skyr breakfasts, the fish-and-greens lunches, the smorrebrod habit she has carried through, the AKT-fueled training meals on top.

For the broader Angel-era nutrition context, our Adriana Lima 90s supermodel era profile covers the parallel framework that ran across the senior Angels, and our Candice Swanepoel fitness routine profile covers the parallel South-African-Brazilian eating framework.

What it teaches anyone who is not a model

The temptation with a working-supermodel eating framework is to copy it directly. That tends not to work well, partly because Skriver eats at the calorie level of an athlete who trains five days a week with Anna Kaiser, and partly because the show-prep eight-week tightening she did before the November shows is genuinely difficult and was always meant to peak briefly and then release. The framework that travels better is the off-season Skriver register: the Danish-baseline rye-and-fish anchors, the protein at every meal, the large vegetable volume, the lemon water on waking, the room for indulgence on weekends.

It is also, importantly, a framework she has been eating for more than fifteen years. The lesson is less about the food than about the consistency. The slow build, not the eight-week tightening.

A few quick answers

Skriver's diet philosophy is balance and consistency. She eats lean protein with every meal, two cups of leafy greens at lunch and dinner, a small starch serving at lunch, healthy fats from avocado and almonds, and two liters of water across the day, sitting on top of a Danish baseline of rye bread, fish, and seasonal vegetables. She does not cut food groups long-term, though she did tighten her plan in the six to eight weeks before the November Victoria's Secret Fashion Show during her Angel years. She maintains her physique through that food framework plus the Anna Kaiser AKT training cadence she has run since roughly 2013, which combines dance cardio, resistance band work, and targeted strength. Hydration is central: two to three liters of water a day, hot lemon water on waking, green tea in the afternoon, and a consistent rule of carrying a water bottle on set.

The short version is that the Skriver eating plan is Danish at its base, Charles Passler protein-and-greens at its working-day register, Anna Kaiser-fueled at its training register, and Scandinavian comfort cooking at the weekend. For the parallel Skriver career coverage, our Josephine Skriver fashion campaigns profile covers the wider working career, and our model diet and nutrition guide covers the industry's general dietary picture. For the entry tier of the same industry, our how to become a model industry insider guide covers the starting point.