Top Chef's Padma Lakshmi Defends Revealing Photos

Padma Lakshmi is not just a model or a TV host—she’s also a mother to one-year-old Krishna Thea. “She’s definitely a city baby,” the 40-year-old mom told People magazine. “I was a city child too, whether it was in a big Indian city like Bombay or here in New York City, so she’s the same. She loves being in the city.”

Now that the 8th season of Top Chef, Bravo’s hit cooking competition, has been wrapped, Lakshmi gets to devote time to her newborn daughter. “She’s growing every day and always learning and seeing and discovering new thing,” Lakshmi continues. “She can’t eat the spicy food that I love since it will be too hard on her system but other than that she’ll eat the foods that I make for her.”

Lakshmi had also released to Page Six magazine nude photos of herself during pregnancy back in 2009, a move that has been much criticized in the media. “I think those are beautiful pictures and they hang in our design studio and my daughter passes those pictures every day,” Lakshmi told FoxNews.com. “I think a woman's body is one of the most beautiful creations on this Earth and it's not what you do, it's how you do it. Michelangelo did nudes too. There's a difference between a beautiful photo and an exploited photo, and I don't believe there's anything exploited in the photos that I've taken.”