Gregg Wallace
(Picture: ITV / Good Morning Britain)Masterchef’s Gregg Wallace has revealed doctors warned him he was “heading for a heart attack” before he shed four-and-a-half stone.
The 57-year-old said he watched himself putting on weight on TV before his doctor warned him of the drastic potential consequences.
Recalling the conversation in 2017, he told Good Morning Britain on Wednesday: “I was overweight, I was eating all the wrong things, I was boozing quite a bit, I was looking at myself getting bigger and bigger on the television.
“I had a good doctor who I had a good relationship with and he said ‘Let’s do a blood test’.
“He phoned me up and said ‘Your cholesterol is through the roof’”.
Wallace said that while doctors tend to worry if cholesterol readings go over five, his reading was approaching 14.
“He said ‘If we don’t change, you’re going to be seriously ill, you’re heading for a heart attack’”, he recalled.
“So I didn’t panic, I thought this is what I need now to change, so I started looking around, thinking how can I be healthier?”
Diets did not “particularly work”, he said, because he was hungry most of the time, but eventually he managed to teach himself “what was healthy and what I could eat and what I couldn’t eat."
However, tackling what he called the “three horsemen of the ‘get fat’ apocalypse” - booze, takeaways and snacking - goes a long way towards fitness, he said.
“I love a beer at the rugby, I love a glass of wine, I have the occasional takeaway, I’m not suggesting anybody stop it,” he said.
“To be honest, I put on half a stone over Christmas, but I now know how to get rid of it and that isn’t by doing anything crazy, that isn’t trying to do anything radical because it’s January 1 , that is because I know what healthy living is all about.”
When asked by Richard Bacon how much of his fitness transformation was because of his workouts, which Wallace frequently shares on social media, he said: “The gym is great, it can sculpt your body.
“But girls if you want a bum like JLo or guys, if you do want a six pack like Peter Andre, you’ve got to lose the fat first.
“You lose weight by eating properly. The gym can help you, it can help speed it up, but it can’t help if your diet is still bad”.
