CELEBRITY INTERVIEW
Thirty years since being interviewed for the first-ever issue of Top Santé in the UK – when the focus was very much about sex, as she had a documentary coming out about it – broadcaster, author and now menopause campaigner Mariella Frostrup, 60, chats about three decades of her evolution, how she stays positive and why she never lets physical intimacy slip by the wayside.
It’s hard to imagine that 30 years of adulthoodhavegonebysince that launch issueof Top Santé!
Although adulthood feels quite recent, I do feel as if I’ve changed, and that the world has also changed dramatically too. That’s quite exciting because it would be depressing to look back on that amount of time and go, “Yes, the same old me”. Part of the joy and pleasure of life is the idea of evolving, so I’m quite relieved to look back at 30-year-old Mariella and think, “What a baby”!
Iregret smokinginmyyouth because nowI’m repulsedbyit.
Back then, I had a very complicated relationship, both with food and cigarettes. If I was happy, I ate normally and would be reasonably slim, and if I wasn’t happy, I ate anything and everything I could lay my hands on and would get even more unhappy about putting on loads of weight. That awful destructive cycle of self-loathing and self-harm was very prevalent until my mid-30s, when I got sick of living like that. If you’re lucky, the whole process of maturing is about gaining confidence in yourself and developing resilience, and both of those things started to kick in during my mid-30s when I started making better choices.
Ever since myearly 30s, I’ve donea mixtureofexercise.
I started doing Step Reebok classes, then going to the gym quite religiously with a girlfriend. We’d go three mornings a week. Then I started doing a bit of yoga. I love the feeling after doing yoga because it pulls out all the knots, aches and pains. As you get older, yoga and Pilates are indispensable, and I do mine all on Zoom – a yoga class twice a week, and a Pilates class once a week.
I now live in the country and walk our dogs every single day, which keeps me active. And once every couple of weeks I go running with some girlfriends, but only for three kilometres – I’m really lazy!
I’m not very good with big birthdays.
When it comes to changing decades, I get slightly overwhelmed and a little bit retrospective; I start thinking backwards and find it hard to think about what I’m going to do going forward. My 40th birthday was amazing because I was in the Seychelles and on the eve of my birthday,
