Padma Lakshmi in Vogue

Padma Lakshmi sizzles in the latest cover of Vogue. Hot at 40, hot aunty Padma Lakshmi is a fantasy material for sure. Once suffering from endometriosis, she says she says that she has never looked or felt better than she does today. Lakshmi feels that what you lose in youth, you gain in sex appeal; what gravity takes away, you gain in wisdom.

"My body is a blueprint of my life, of every tragedy, emotional or physical," she states. Whether it's the stitches she got from a handsome doctor when she sliced herself while cutting a potato in Corsica, or the impossible-to-miss seven-inch-long scar on her arm, the result of a car accident in Malibu when she was 14. She wears it proudly now, a badge of survival; and when editor Anna Wintour asked her in 2001 to write about it for US Vogue, she penned an eloquent piece about self-doubt and beauty, and the transformative power of one man's vision.

She acted in the movie The Caribbean, for which she had to gain 20 pounds, and which was a catalyst in cementing her culinary career. "Oh, how easy it was to put on the pounds! And then, of course, I had to lose it. I was 27, and it was the first time I'd had to think about my weight. I wanted to lose it in a healthy way, there was no way I was going to be able to follow a diet."