How food fads fed Cherry’s resolve for her own children
Growing up as an anxious eater herself, Cherry Healey knows how easy it can be for unhealthy habits to set in. By After a bruising loss and stinging criticism from his father, Chris Eubank Jr talks to about growing up in his dad’s shadow and how he copes
It took her 30 years to achieve a relaxed relationship with eating. TV presenter Cherry Healey has worked on various food-related shows over her career, like Inside The Factory and Britain’s Favourite Supermarket Foods, but for most of her life food was a source of anxiety for the now 37-year-old.
It is, of course, something many people will relate to — from being overwhelmed by pictures of the so-called ‘perfect bodies’ (read: skinny), to feeling the pressure to try the latest fad diets (which, more often than not, aren’t sustainable and can even be damaging to your mental and physical health).
Now that Healey is older and wiser, she doesn’t want her own two children to grow up with the same feelings around food that she had. Her daughter Coco and son Bear are four and eight respectively, and Healey is on a mission to help them foster a healthy attitude towards food.
“When I was growing up, I really got into the diet cycle,” Healey confesses. “I tried everything — all the diet foods full of weird chemicals. They had the most amazing list of ingredients, just like something out of a science-fiction film.
“My weight was really difficult to control, I was miserable, I hated food, and I was never full or satisfied.”
Reaching the age of 30 proved to be a big turning-point. “I decided to stop being scared of real food, and ate proper, nutritious food,” she recalls.
It might sound like a no-brainer, but for Healey, this was a big shift — but one that ended up making her feel so much better. “I got full, I had more energy, and I didn’t have to eat as much because my brain was getting the message that it was satisfied,” she explains, of how things changed once her approach to eating shifted.
“Now I eat things like cheese and pasta,” she adds with a giggle, “which my 20-year-old self wouldn’t have believed!”
Now that Healey has stopped eating food that’s packed full of chemicals, she wants the same for her children. Much to her surprise, a lot of the snacks she’s been buying have a whole host of ‘hidden’ nasty ingredients in them. “I’m really keen to have good, wholesome food,” she says. “Your body shouldn’t have loads of unusual chemicals in it, and I want the same for my kids — I want them to love food and not be pumped full of salt, flavourings and everything artificial.”
Salt has been a particularly thorny issue in Healey’s quest for healthy snacks. “The amount of salt in some children’s snacks is staggering,” she says in disbelief. “If your kid is having that, it’ll blow their heads off, and all the other food you’re making will seem incredibly bland to them.”
Healey knows how damaging an unhealthy relationship with food can be.
“I don’t want food to become a point of anxiety for my children,” she says.
“Food should be a nice, lovely thing — not an emotional crutch. If my children fall over, then I give them a big hug and lots of love, instead of them going to the sweetie jar. I don’t placate them with snacks or sweets. I don’t want them to grow up associating emotions with food.”
Growing up, many of us remember being forced to always finish all the food on our plates. However, this is not something Healey believes in now that she is a mother herself. “I use the word ‘full’ a lot in our house,” she says. “I never, ever make them eat once they say they’re full. I think that’s quite different to my mum’s generation, where there was a real thing about eating everything on your plate, but then you push yourself past fullness.”
Healey is working on helping her kids recognise when they’re full, and then stopping eating. She believes eating past this point is when children can develop a tricky, and potentially damaging, relationship with food.
“I’ve learned so much about the word ‘full’,” she explains. “It’s all about eating proper food and allowing yourself to eat to the point that you’re full, but not beyond. When I’m full, I don’t need to snack — I won’t come down and raid the bread drawer or eat four bowls of cereal at midnight and then regret it.”
Cherry Healey has partnered with baby and toddler food brand Organix to launch a nationwide junk-busting campaign. Join the debate on social media and share what you find with the hashtag #FoodYouCanTrust
In a plush, red-walled room in Victoria’s Grosvenor Hotel, Chris Eubank Jr is flicking though his iPhone pictures — his 11st 13lb frame wedged into a tiny, winged armchair — showing me the perks of life as one of Britain’s most promising boxers. There’s the gleaming silver Bentley GT and the ultra-modern, white-walled, four-bedroom £1.75m ‘ultimate bachelor pad’ he’s just completed on in Brighton, with heated pool, while his Instagram is full of pictures of him driving custom motorbikes, jet skiing and with stars such as ‘my girl’ Rita Ora ( just friends).
“I’ve never wanted to be your average Joe,” says the 28-yearold, wearing his own brand Next Gen tracksuit, a gold-trimmed Moncler jacket and Nike Air Force 1 trainers. “I’ve always wanted to stand out from the crowd — to be someone looked at and admired, and scrutinised. I’d much rather be scrutinised or criticised than have no one look at me at all.”
But, as his bloodshot right eye shows, this lifestyle comes at a price. It’s a fortnight since Eubank Jr, one of Britain’s brightest boxing hopes with 26 wins in 28 bouts, heir to the Eubank legacy, lost cruelly on points to Londoner George Groves (29) in the World Boxing Super Series semi-final in Manchester.
A behind the scenes video from the dressing room after the fight shows boxing legend Chris Eubank telling his son he deserved to lose. How does it feel to go all that way and have your own dad tell you that you weren’t good enough? Was it awkward? “That was his opinion,” he says, cagily. “My father’s opinion is important to me, but it is what it is.”
❝ I don’t use food to placate the kids. I give them a hug instead of getting them sweets
His father forbade him from boxing until he was 14. “I think he didn’t think I had it in me,” says Eubank Jr. “He said do anything else. Kick a ball around, play tennis, be a doctor, do anything where you’re not getting punched in the head. I was a child of privilege, I was living in a mansion going to private school. So he thought, where’s this kid going to get his hunger from? How’s he going to be able to deal with the pain and hardship that comes from being a fighter?”
But he had his own battles to face. At school he was “boisterous but got decent grades” — though he was expelled from two schools for “scuffles”, including prestigious Brighton College, and completed his GCSEs at nearby Shoreham College.
“I started to understand how important it was for me to make my own name pretty early on after years of noticing people treating me a certain way because of who my dad was. Some people wanted to be friends, others wanted to test me because I was Chris Eubank’s son — inside schools, outside of school, on the streets. They learned pretty quickly that testing me was a very serious mistake.”
At 15, a total stranger confronted him outside Brighton town centre following one of his dad’s losses. “He said, ‘I bet two grand on your father, give me the money back’. He was a grown man — average size — against a teenager. He pushed me, I think he was drunk, so I said, ‘Listen, I don’t have two grand on me and if I did I wouldn’t give it to you — you made a bet, get out my face’. He went to push me again and made an effort to grab me, and I knocked him out.”
Later, he graduated from high school in Las Vegas, after his father sent him to Nevada to complete his boxing schooling. When he turned pro, the boxing world “thought it was a gimmick”, he says. “It was Eubank Jr, just in the ring to make a quick buck, then he’s gonna go and do something else. I’ve had a lot of doubters, haters, a lot of negative comments online — I still do, to this