PR.com (Allison Kugel): In your early thirties you were experiencing some chronic health problems?

Carol Alt: Here's the thing…I guess because I'm surrounded by young people all the time in the [modeling and entertainment] industry…there's always somebody coming up behind you. I got a chance on a trip to Venezuela to work with a nineteen-year-old girl and I was about 34 years old at the time. I saw this girl happy, fun, full of energy. She was jumping on tables. Now I'm the name on the project, technically the big star there, but the entire crew was drawn to her because she had energy and she was jumping and she was laughing and everybody was having a good time with her. And I was kind of tired and sitting on the side. They were putting her in g-strings and I was hiding myself behind rocks, because the flight had made me bloat. I only had the one day [down there] and I was literally hiding behind rocks. As I got on the plane to go home I was sitting there thinking, "What happened to me as a body, as a person…between, say, 25 and 34?" At 34 years old I was on allergy medicines for my sinuses, I was taking eight Tums a night for acid stomach, and I was really, really tired. My body was starting to change. I was eating less food. I was already eating no food to maintain my weight at 125 lbs. at 5'10 ½" as a model. Now at 34, even starving myself for two days wasn't getting me down to my fighting weight. It didn't matter how much I worked out. I was up to 135 lbs. at that point and just couldn't get it off, and I just couldn't eat any less food. It took me Nyquil to fall asleep, it took me coffee to wake up. And it wasn't like, "Oh my god, I have to have it!" It was just something I did. It was just my routine.

PR.com: It sounds kind of extreme though. It sounds like, maybe you were doing the opposite of what you're doing right now, and sort of really letting yourself go.

Carol Alt: But here's the thing, Allison…it wasn't extreme! It was pretty normal. Look what people take! I wasn't feeling extreme. I was just like, "Everybody takes Nyquil when they have the flu." It just makes me fall asleep so much faster. It gets into your veins. You can feel it going in…you know what I mean? It's a drug, even though it's over the counter. My point is, at 34 years old, I was experiencing those things that everybody was calling "aging." You're just getting older. All my girlfriends say, "Oh, I hit the wall. I just started gaining weight. All of a sudden I got wrinkles. All of a sudden this. All of a sudden that." My point to you is it wasn't all of a sudden.

PR.com: When did you first start to feel your body not cooperating?

Carol Alt: It was this trip (her trip to Venezuela) because I got to see somebody in front of me who was like I was at nineteen. And my question was, "How did I get where I was at 34?" My acid stomach I looked at as a badge of courage. I'm stressed, I'm the highest paid model in the world, I'm doing four films a year…I wore it as a red badge of courage. But truthfully, I'm just as stressed now. I probably work harder and I do more diverse things, and I haven't taken a Tums in ten or eleven years.

PR.com: How did you learn about raw eating? Because you're saying, I was not liking the state of my mind and my body. How did you find the solution?

Carol Alt: Coming back from that trip made me very depressed. And I thought, "You know, I just don't feel like working anymore. I don't feel like being in L.A. I don't feel like pounding down people's doors for parts." So I took off to the desert. I went to my mother-in-law's house. Nobody had the number there. And I just remember being there and trying to relax, but just tired and not feeling like doing anything. I thought, "What's happening to me?" And I remembered my father saying to me, and my father died of Liver Cancer in 1983 on Christmas morning, my father said to me just before he died, he said "Carol Ann, I should've known there was something wrong with me when I didn't feel like working." And my father and I are exactly alike. I am my father's daughter. I love to work, I love my job, I love the people that I meet and I didn't feel like working anymore. Something in my head said there's something seriously wrong. This is not aging. And certainly if I was aging at this rate, what am I going to be like at 45, 55, or 65?

click to read story with Supermodel Carol Alt