CELEBRITY INTERVIEW
Daytime TV presenter Lorraine Kelly, 62, talks new year health overhauls, beauty products for mature skin, plus the power of a positive mindset.
The new year is a good clean slate. I put on a lot of weight during Covid, and last November, when I was wearing a size 14 dress, a button flew off when I was on air! I thought, “I have to do something about this”.
Last January, I started using the WW app and it was a game changer. It’s all online, you don’t go to class, you’re not weighed in front of people and there’s no sense of feeling ashamed or worried. You track what you eat, which helps find wee danger points. For me, around 11am, after porridge for breakfast, I’m craving something, so I have a banana.
I’m also pretty hungry when I get home from work and that’s another danger point, so I always carry a banana or a bag of nuts with me, then for lunch I have soup or chilli from a big pot my husband Steve has made on a Sunday, either with or without a big hunk of bread!
It’s about balance. You don’t want to be eating deep fried lard but, at the same time, you don’t just want to be looking at a lettuce and feeling miserable. If I want a bag of crisps and a glass of wine at the weekend, while watching Strictly, it’s got to be done!
Being healthy is all about taking baby steps. Come January 1, don’t think you’re going to run a marathon or drop a stone. Set realistic goals.
Maybe go for a half-hour walk one day, then 35 minutes the next. In the new year, people rush out, join gyms and think progress will happen right away so then they get disillusioned. It took me six months to lose a stone and a half but because I did it gradually, over time, and was never on a diet, the weight stayed off.
I was a teenager in the 70s and did all the stupid diets. Remember the cabbage soup and the F-Plan Diet? F, for what? It was F for farting! The diet was awful. It took a little while to realise that these blinking things didn’t work for me. Some of the times I’ve been at my least healthiest were being a reporter on the road; I wasn’t overweight but I wasn’t eating particularly well because I was grabbing food from petrol stations and was on call all the time.
I also wasn’t particularly healthy after I had my daughter, Rosie, and it took me a while to get rid of the baby weight. I remember thinking, “She’s going to be at university before I get rid of this weight!”.
Then during Covid, I was comfort eating, and what started off as a glass of
