Love Island star Camilla Thurlow appeared on Lorraine on Thursday where she chatted to host Andi Peters about pregnancy, Jamie Jewitt, and her new book.
Camilla has written Not My Type: Finding My Place In The Real World, about her experiences on and before Love Island, where she met Jamie.
The couple are still together and are expecting a baby, and Camilla revealed: "It's been ups and downs, but I'm very happy, very excited."
Andi asked Camilla where the inspiration came for her book, and she replied: "Probably the biggest part of it is the work I did with bomb disposal in the humanitarian sector."
She went on: "The work I did was predominantly in land mine clearance, which is when you go to areas that have experienced conflict, and you remove explosive remnants of war that are still posing a risk to people who are trying to return to their homes and live their lives again."
Camilla revealed the real reason she decided to star on Love Island, after she experienced such horrors in her job and found it hard to connect with people.
"I came back from Afghanistan and I was really struggling with social dislocation," she said.
"I was struggling to process the events that I’d seen in the years preceding, and I was struggling to reconnect with my friends and family.
"So I couldn’t quite work out the best way to figure out my future, I couldn’t work out how to balance everything.
"I knew that I was working in something that I loved and felt passionate about, equally I knew at that point that I wasn’t maintaining healthy relationships with friends and family at home.
"I was trying to figure out a balance between the two but I just felt very trapped in an incredibly negative mindset.
When she was approached by a casting director for Love Island, she thought: "Oh here’s an answer, this is something that I can do for the next seven weeks."
She said the situation was a great help, explaining: "I think if you’re struggling with socialising, Love Island does present quite a unique immersive socialising experience where you are forced to interact with people every single day.
"I realised as scary was it was, that challenge was gong to be very good for me at that particular time."
Camilla also admitted the first thing that attracted her to Jamie was his deep voice, and added "we just got on from the beginning".
"I don't think we'd have met in any other way, our lives were completely different, we came from totally different jobs," she said.
* Lorraine airs weekdays on ITV at 9am
