New MasterChef judge Grace Dent has revealed she made a major life change after realising she was easily consuming 4,000 calories before 10am.
The 51-year-old is set to front the next series of the show alongside current presenter John Torode. It comes after Gregg Wallace stepped away from his BBC role amid an investigation into historical allegations of misconduct.
The Guardian food critic Grace, who appeared on MasterChef: Battle Of The Critics and has taken part in I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, will host the celebrity edition of the hit cooking show next year. It is unclear if she will present the other series in the MasterChef franchise.
It was Grace’s work as a food critic that she says prompted her to make a huge life decision. During a conversation with Caroline Hirons on the Glad We Had This Chat podcast in July, Grace revealed she decided to quit drinking after spending her adult life “always on a diet”.
She said: “Being a restaurant critic means your body doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the newspaper really. There is always thousands, and thousands, and thousands of calories coming.
“Yesterday, when I was at the restaurant, I’d eaten at least 4,000 calories by 10am. It’s perilously easy to do that, a big stack of pancakes, a really lovely latte and then trying another course, and then things in brioche, a little trifle, and there you go, 4,000. People who know me say it’s either a feast or like being with a giant squirrel.”
Podcaster Caroline joked that Grace walks around with a “bag of nuts” saying “no more food”. The critic responded: “My brother takes the mick out of me because I’ll eat a load of food in the morning and then go on MasterChef in HD TV. And no one has ever seen themselves on HD TV and gone ‘god, you look amazing’.
“The camera sticks on more weight. And with my life, being one of the only women who does it, it’s clawing back calories.”
Grace said she finally realised she “couldn’t outrun her diet” and decided overnight to give up alcohol. She continued: “My journey with my weight has been a very typical Gen X journey, I’ve been on a diet all of my life.
“When people say ‘you shouldn’t talk about that’ or ‘it’s not okay to know calories or weigh yourself’. I’m like, look, I’m a Gen X woman, my earliest memories are piles of diet magazines sitting on the coffee table, cut-out-and-keep 900 calorie a day diets to get you to slim down into your bikini.”
She added: “I’m three years sober. I think three years ago I realised I couldn’t outrun my diet, no matter how much I walked.
Image:
BBC)“I couldn’t outrun how much drink was in my life, I was just a British drinker. A very classic British drinker and I got to the age of 47 or 48 and thought ‘this is going to kill me’.”
Grace says she feels a lot of women “can’t escape” drinking, highlighting how occasions such as Christmas and hen parties are popular events of alcohol consumption. The critic says she decided to stop drinking overnight and soon found the weight “started to drop right off”.
It prompted people, she says, to ask if she had tried weight loss jabs. She says she tells them she simply gave up alcohol.
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