Natalie Portman Trains for 8 Hours a Day

Natalie Portman’s acting career started out as the young girl (aged 12) that the hitman looks after in Leon (The Professional). Her career really started to fly when she won the role of Padmé Amidala in the new Star Wars films. She played an action role in V for Vendetta.

Natalie Portman’s Diet

Natalie Portman is very well equipped to ensure that she follows a healthy diet. She is very well educated, with a degree in psychology. She also had a research paper published in the Journal of Chemical Education about bio-waste and reusable energy.

She is a vegetarian and has been one all her life. She does not eat any animal products and has been a vegan since 2009. Her slim figure is almost entirely due to her healthy eating. Although vegan she still ensures that she gets a balanced diet with all the essential minerals, oils and fats that the body needs. She mostly eats vegan soups, lentils or raw foods, especially salads and fresh fruits, nuts and seeds.

Natalie Portman the Dancer

As a child she did 6 dance classes a week, only stopping just before filming The Professional when she was 12 years old. She proved in a televised interview that she can still tap dance. In 2009 she started dating ballet choreographer Benjamin Millepied who she met when filming dance film Black Swan.

Natalie’s Yoga Workouts

Natalie performs yoga workouts at home to stay in shape. She is quite active and says that scuba diving is one of her favorite pastimes.

1 Year Fitness Training For Black Swan

During the BAFTA Awards it was mentioned that Natalie Portman started training one year before the filming of Black Swan started.

She exercised for up to 8 hours a day, which included a 2 mile swim each day. Here dedication to the role is outstanding really. She had the body of the ballet dancer by the time filming began, all she was lacking was the same skills of a professional ballet dancer.

Natalie Portman Talks To The BBC About Dieting For Black Swan

Natalie Portman spoke the to the BBC recently about losing weight for her part in the movie Black Swan. She says that she was originally told to “lose as much as you can without looking sick“, but did accidentally take it too far and was told she ended up looking a bit sick.

Her experience was unpleasant and she does not recommend extreme dieting on anyone. Much of her weight was lost as a result of training for the dance role for 5 hours a day for a year. To diet she just ate very small portions at each meal to ensure that she was not getting many calories.

She started to diet a few months before filming of Black Swan started. She said that she started to think of food as fuel, always thinking about getting the most energy with the smallest number of calories.

This is essentially what many bodybuilders have to do when cutting, to consume enough to maintain muscle and provide energy to perform, but also ensuring that fat levels are reduced to a minimum.

Natalie Portman did not say how many calories she was eating each day, but it could have been as low as 500 calories to lose the weight and get very slim (too slim) for her role as ballet dancer in Black Swan.

Natalie Portman has always been slim, so for her to go on a diet is very extreme. Coupled with a vigorous training regime to get in shape to dance her diet certainly caused her to lose a lot of weight very quickly.

Reference

“A Simple Method To Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar” by Natalie Portman., published in Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 75 No. 10 October 1998