Strictly Come Dancing legend Arlene Phillips has revealed her ‘one dieting rule’ as she explains how she stays in shape at 81. The choreographer and ex judge on the BBC show also said that she’d like to try weight loss drugs - but is afraid of injections.
Dame Arlene left the BBC show amid a row over possible ageism - and she admitted she would have stayed given the chance. One the subject of staying slim told The Times : “My only dieting rule is that wherever I go, I’ll have a packet of chicory in my bag. Because if I’m hungry and ready to reach for crisps or a Cadbury Dairy Milk Wholenut bar, I will then say to myself, ‘No! You’ve got your chicory.’”
But she admitted that now she’s in her 80s she also thinks it might be time to throw caution to the wind sometimes: “This has not been a good year for my weight, not at all. Sometimes I make a decision that I’m going to eat frugally and carefully, and my mind can stick with it. Other times I just think, ‘You’re in your eighties — you can have what you want. Make sure you’re enjoying everything you eat!’”
She added: “I wish I had the courage to go on Ozempic. I don’t like injections and I don’t know how highly it has been tested to make sure it is OK. But I’d love to lose these extra 14lb that seem to have attached themselves to my body. I’d like to make it easy.”
The veteran dancer was on the inaugural judging panel, working on the show between 2004 and 2008. In 2009, she was replaced by Alesha Dixon, which led to allegations of discrimination against older women on television, but the BBC strongly denied this was the case.
On her exit she said: “I can’t absolutely say that ageism led to my leaving Strictly. I’ve never been told that my going had anything to do with my age. The thing about contracts is that they’re for a finite time and we were on yearly contracts back then. We all knew they weren’t guaranteed to last. I think the BBC wanted a change, and I was the one to go.
“Len Goodman’s death was difficult for me. He was a beautiful human being and we had a wonderful dynamic as fellow judges on Strictly. Everything you saw in Len was Len. There were no airs and graces. He always used to say, ‘I’m just a boring teacher from Dartford.’ And I think that’s where he kept himself, no matter how his career expanded.”
Dame Arlene previously spoke about the early days of Strictly, saying she and her fellow judges did not think it would be a success. “None of us thought it was going to be a success, it just was small – I could actually say intimate – but no-one other than Bruce (Forsyth) was confident.
“You can see, when you look back at the early episodes, how nervous everyone was, and also we were reacting as if we were just in the studio, as opposed to how it grew into drawing reactions from millions. We were just all sort of uncomfortable, we hadn’t had enough rehearsals, we had a production assistant crawling behind us saying ‘Press your buzzer’.
“The way I felt that people were loving it was watching Natasha Kaplinsky grow. She didn’t want to do the show, she was a serious newsreader, but she was persuaded to do the show and was so nervous, and then gradually what you saw was Brendan (Cole) and Natasha there every week improving.
“He hardly looked at her on that first number, but they came together suddenly as a couple, they were strong and powerful, week by week, and after about week four – the power of that performance – we all started to switch and go ‘Hang on there’s something here’.”
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