In the October issue of Health magazine, actress and entrepreneur Jessica Alba dishes on starting her own business, living healthy, baby weight and more.
The mother of two daughters, Honor, 5, and Haven 2, launched The Honest Company after feeling a need for more natural products for herself and her family. Jessica shares that it was a little scary to start her own company. “There were certainly moments when it was scary. The day we launched, I was like, Is anyone even going to go to our website [honest.com]? Our distribution is mainly the Internet. It took me about three years of people telling me I was crazy and that there’s no way it could ever happen before I found the partners who could balance my weaknesses.”
On feeling different levels of fulfillment with her company and her acting career: “Oh, yeah. My decisions here affect more than just me. It’s a lot of pressure. This is intense. This is important. This is time-consuming. When I do a movie or a television show, I have control over so little of it. So I’ve found, lately, that it’s so much more fulfilling to be a lot more risky with my acting choices.”
Jessica credits wearing a corset to help her regain her shape after giving birth to Haven. She swears she’d do it again. “Of course. Who wouldn’t! Your muscles are completely stretched. It gets the muscle memory going quicker. It’s just to get your body back. Because everything is everywhere!”
On how her dieting attitude has changed, “To me, it’s knowing that if you eat unprocessed fresh food—it doesn’t all have to be organic, but try to have the least amount of GMOs [genetically modified organisms] and pesticides—you have energy, aren’t starving and don’t have to count calories. When I’m “dieting,” I’m not eating as many snacks—because I love snacks. [Laughs] Popchips, Pirate’s Booty—or I could eat a pound of fruit. So I cut down on snacking when I’m trying to be healthy.”
Jessica’s favorite way to relax after a long day, “A bath after the kids go to sleep. I put in a bag of Epsom salts or Honest Bubble Bath, and sometimes I’ll watch TV or sometimes I’m on my iPad on Pinterest. There is no way that taking a bath is fun when the kids are awake, because they want to get in, too, and they’re for sure peeing in it!”
Photo Credit: Getty & Wenn