Nadia: “I wasted years obsessing about my flaws”
Loose Women star Nadia Sawalha on body positivity, binge eating and why she’s learnt to love and appreciate what she’s got
She’s kept fans entertained during the pandemic by sharing tongue-incheek posts about body confidence. One Instagram snap showed Nadia Sawalha completely naked, covering her modesty with just a tub of Lurpak butter. She was cheekily poking fun at actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who celebrated her 48th birthday in September with a naked Instagram photo, crediting her own brand of body butter with helping her prep. Another of Nadia’s posts showed a string of images of the star in her underwear, to highlight the impact different lighting and positions can have on the way you look. “It’s all smoke and mirrors. I would do anything to have the years back that I wasted obsessing about my ‘flaws’,” Nadia said at the time.
At the moment, the TV star – who is a dress size 12-14 – admits she’s not brimming with confidence when it comes to her body, but she refuses to let it bother her as much as she used to.
MOTIVATION
“I’m not feeling too confident at the moment,” she explains. “I talk a lot about body confidence and weight, and all the stinking thinking we have around that. But I keep laughing, because the old me would have been like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve put on loads of weight, what am I going to look like?’ But actually I have overeaten a bit and I’ve enjoyed it! Now I will readjust and eat a bit less.”
Nadia, 56, ran two London Marathons consecutively in 2011 and 2012, but reveals a lack of motivation this year has seen her hang up her running shoes.
“I used to run, but I can’t do it any more, because if you’re a bit overweight, running hurts your knees,” she explains.
Instead, Nadia keeps active by walking, doing yoga and the odd HIIT (high intensity interval training) workout.
“I walk a lot. I do 10-15,000 steps a day, and I practice yoga every Monday and Wednesday. I also follow online trainer Lucy Wyndham-Read’s workouts too, just seven-minute blasts,” Nadia reveals.
Over the festive season, Nadia – who has daughters Maddie, 18, and Kiki-Bee, 13, with her TV producer husband of 18 years, Mark Adderley – binged on chocolates, sweets and cakes. “I said to Mark, ‘If
I carry on this way, I’m going to put on
3st’. We do a lot of recipe testings for our cooking vlogs, so we have stuff around we wouldn’t normally have. Boxes of Roses were brought home too soon in December – Mark came in with a massive box, and Stollen cake, and it just set me off. If I start, I find it really hard to stop,” she says.
But Nadia isn’t one to beat herself up as, like all of us, she’s had a difficult year, and compares her experience to that of the menopause. In June, Nadia said going through the menopause three years ago took her to a “dark place mentally” and the anxiety returned at the start of the first lockdown in March.
PARANOID
“I didn’t deal well with the restrictions at all – it was very unlike me. I was very over-thetop worried about everything. I’m still a bit like, ‘Oh, has this really happened?’
“My dad had recently had a heart operation, so I was manic about that too. My parents live next door to me and I was so paranoid about them getting ill, so I socially-distanced way before the first lockdown.
“Everyone was laughing at me, saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re so over the top’. I’m usually a chaotic person, but I was really meticulous, washing all my food when it came in – I was absolutely fanatical about it. It was a very difficult time,” she explains.
But sharing her worries with fans on Instagram, alongside Mark, helped her through it.
“There were so many people who were anxious, and people living on their own who didn’t have anyone to talk to, so we did two Instagram lives a day. We had an incredible community who listened to other people’s stories. It made me go, ‘OK, let’s look for the gratitude, focus on the things that are good.’”
However, there is one aspect of the
lockdown that Nadia and Mark haven’t struggled with and that’s the closure of schools, as they have both home-schooled their daughters since 2014. “It was really interesting watching everyone in this tailspin of the home-schooling situation. It was really life-affirming for us, because it was like, ‘Oh, actually, we know what we’re doing.’”
Nevertheless, Nadia is relieved to be starting afresh with a brand new year. “I love New Year and resolutions,” she says. “My resolutions are to exercise more and eat less – it’ll go t*ts up by week two. But I want to focus on being more grateful and appreciate all the things I’m lucky to have.”
● Honey, I Home-Schooled The Kids by Nadia Sawalha and Mark Adderley is published by Coronet, £14.99, out now
‘I want to focus on being more
grateful’