‘I WILL ALWAYS STAND BY MY LOW-FAT MANTRA’
The diet-club legend Rosemary Conley is back and looking sensational at 70. She shares her tips for staying in shape
Slimming queen ROSEMARY CONLEY was a beloved go-to diet guru until low- carb and sugar-free trends saw her ideas fall from favour. Now she’s back, still eight stone, unlined and looking fabulous at 70 – living proof that her methods work, as she tells Louise Carpenter
Remember Rosemary Conley, the permed diet queen of the 80s and 90s who gave millions of women the magic formula for achieving slim hips and thighs? Well, she’s back with a new diet (she never really went away) – and at 70 is looking incredible.
Called the 3-2-1 Diet, her new formula has the same low-fat message as The Hip and Thigh Diet, the book published in 1988 that made her both a millionaire and a morning TV celebrity. ‘Women wanted that book,’ she says today, looking fabulous from her hour-long morning beauty routine (four face creams, body cream, full make-up, Velcro curlers, even when she’s pottering at home). ‘ They wanted slim hips and thighs and the book delivered. Women queued at WH Smith to buy it and they queued to come to our classes.’
Along with the highs of 45 years in the diet industry, Rosemary has also weathered considerable setbacks: her low-fat diet fell out of fashion when sugar and carbs became demonised instead of fat; her Diet & Fitness magazine closed down; and then, in 2014, her empire, Rosemary Conley Diet and Fitness, went into administration because women, faced with myriad diet choices and other crazes such as Zumba classes, stopped going to the Conley franchised slimming clubs. However, although she lost her business HQ – a €3.5-million mansion set in 140 acres of parkland – and had to lay off many of her close friends, she has bounced back.
Today, her hair is a perfect halo of blonde. Her face is extraordinarily unlined for a woman of 70 – ‘not genetic at all’, she says. Like everything else in her life – bar a brief dalliance with Botox five years ago – her good skin is the result of effort and iron will. For two minutes ➤
➤ every morning and night, in the home she shares with her husband of 30 years, Mike (13 years her junior), she pops a contraption in her mouth called the Facial-Flex Ultra that claims to exercise the 30 muscle groups from her jawline down to her cleavage.
It’s why she can still reveal her décolletage (Mike tells her she is still ‘the most beautiful woman in the room’).
But more to the point, she’s still eight stone, the weight she achieved in 1986 in a eureka moment, which she discovered almost by accident as a result of a low-fat diet to help a gallstone problem. And she’s still a dress size eight.
Rosemary does have arthritis in her feet, one of which has been made worse by a bad fall down some stairs, meaning she can no longer walk her dogs as often. This panicked her initially since her diet regime is based on 30 minutes of exercise a day. She makes up for it, she explains cheerfully, in a special gym run by physiotherapists. Slimness – she never calls it thin – is very important to her. ‘I hate being fat. I enjoy being slim. It all comes down to that,’ she says. ‘Yes, I am prepared to do my exercises and yes, I’m prepared not to overeat.’
Rosemary continues to run two exercise classes for her regulars on a Monday night near where she lives. Her daughter Dawn – ‘she has a super figure, she’s beautiful’ – from her first marriage has a five-year- old son whom Rosemary adores, but she admits she is not a hands- on granny. ‘I’m not a natural with children, but he and I get on brilliantly when I have him to myself.’
Whereas once, in her early 20s, Rosemary used to love food and was greedy and unhappy, and ‘so wide I couldn’t see my feet over my tummy’, since losing weight she regards food only as fuel.
‘I’m not excited by it, which people might think is terribly sad, but that’s how I am.’ It’s a sacrifice she is prepared to make in order to continue to look good.
On top of the Facial-Flex (which has saved her from the sagging face of both a dieter and being 70), the exercise, the giving away of anything fattening – ‘I wouldn’t even open a box of chocolates’ – there is her unashamed reliance on make-up, even if she is lying by a pool on holiday. ‘Not putting my face on would be like going out without my underwear.’
She’d never have cosmetic surgery – ‘Ooh, never; it’s so obvious’ – and why would she? She seems to hold it all back with simple hard work. She took her hair to a lighter shade of blonde around the age of 50 – when perms went out of fashion – and went ‘smooth. I would never have gone grey. That was never an option.’
Rosemary wore heels all the time until very recently but, she says, showing me her medium-height pixie boots, ‘I can only go to this height now.’ She loves clothes, particularly those from the Madeleine fashion catalogue.
When she turned 50 she really hit her stride with ‘an absolute desire to conquer the world’, pushing onwards with the far-reaching scope of her lucrative empire. She struggled with becoming 60, although, she says, with her characteristic optimism, ‘I lost my mojo for about two weeks when I was 53 and then I started taking HRT. I never looked back. I’m on it for life, no question about it. In my opinion, when you look at the risks, they’re tiny, unless there is a history of breast cancer. Don’t let the doctors talk you out of staying on it.’ She credits HRT with switching something on in her body that enables her to stop eating when she’s full. ‘It was always a struggle until then. Maybe I had a hormone missing or something.’
But while The Hip and Thigh Diet and the other Conley plans that followed had longevity as far as diets go, they did fall out of fashion. ‘With each new diet people asked me, “What’s different?” but I was never going to suddenly start saying, “Eat all the fat you like.”’
Although low-fat diets work, what we all want, she thinks, particularly the media, is a new diet with a fresh message. It is why the slimming industry makes millions. It has to keep us hoping. Rosemary explains this obsession with the ‘new’ with no bitterness. However, she knows what helped her attain thin thighs and is sticking to it. Forget olive oil or full-fat yoghurt – too many calories, plain and simple. She also embraces carbohydrates: ‘I love carbs.’
What’s ‘new’ in Rosemary’s 3-2-1 Diet is its light eating on certain days of the week (a nod to the 5:2 Diet that kicked off the fasting trend). You are allowed to consume 800 calories on three ‘light’ eating days of the first week, then on two days, and finally one. Its premise is still that fat, snacks and calorie-heavy foods are the enemy, but there is flexibility on the non-light days.
‘I will always stand by my low-fat mantra,’ Rosemary insists. ‘I have seen it work for 30 years. Cutting down on fat is the easiest thing to do because it’s double the number of calories so it seems to me a no-brainer. I’m not going ➤
➤ to argue with anybody else’s philosophy or diet. I think probably all diets work if you can stick to them. What I am keen on is people following a diet that is doable for the rest of their lives. Extreme diets that you can only keep up for two weeks turn you into a kid in a candy shop when you eat normally.’
But four years ago, new diet and fitness trends started to affect Rosemary’s successful business model. Her 180 Rosemary Conley franchises – where she ‘sold’ her clubs to owners for a fairly hefty fee – were down by 25 per cent. By the beginning of 2014, she and her husband understood that they would have to wind up the company, sell off the palatial HQ and let 40 staff go. Mercifully, she says, while they pumped a lot of their money into trying to save the business and she forewent her salary, their home was not affected.
‘Our staff were like family,’ she says, ‘but other types of classes were springing up all over the place. When you go through something like that, it is unbelievably sad, especially when people who you consider to be your friends turn against you. But that’s life and it’s business. It is hard and you have to be able to move on from it.’
Three things helped her, she says: her family, her Christian faith and, finally, her absolute conviction in the power of her fat-free diets.
The collapse left her with creditors, presumably among the people who turned against her. But, as well as her faith, I suspect that Rosemary is really a lot tougher than the kind, gentle and girlish person she presents (it’s why she was so popular with the public when she was a contestant on Dancing on Ice in 2012). She tells a story, from the height of The Hip and Thigh Diet’s popularity when magazines were clamouring to serialise her books.
‘I said, “OK, sealed bids”,’ she recalls. ‘One magazine offered £120,000 and I said, “£120,000 plus 12 weeks of free advertising”.’ And she got it. See what I mean?
Rosemary grew up in a council house. Her mother devised a hairnet to put over curlers and ended up selling it to Harrods.
Her father had a business that hit the skids, but then worked hard for years to pay off the debt. She comes from a family of grafters and admits that her working- class parents taught her a strong work ethic.
Is she a steely person? Resilient? ‘Yes, I think I am,’ she says. ‘I won’t let people walk over me. And I felt [when she lost her business] an enormous strength from God.’
Not one to quit, Rosemary – after the administration process – channelled her efforts into a new online business, rosemaryconley.com, which offers a whole world of dieting tips, recipes and motivational videos, on a subscription basis. She often picks up the phone and gives advice herself.
‘I love my job because I give people their lives back,’ she says with a laugh. She genuinely wants every woman to have a trim figure that will make them happier (because she believes there aren’t many women happier to be fat than thin).
Now she is 70, has Rosemary been tempted to call it a day? She looks horrified. She has folders full of pictures of women who are losing weight the Conley way. And she has just recorded 42 motivational videos, each a minute long, for her website. ‘I sit there with my dog by my side and it’s all very cosy and recorded at home – so that’s lovely.’
One of the things that is so appealing about Rosemary’s new book is that she is a first- class motivator. ‘I have absolute empathy with anybody who is trying to lose weight because I’ve been there. I know what a vicious cycle it is and how depressed we can become.’
Although Rosemary was a skinny child, she became a plump teenager and by her early 20s was overweight, partly caused by circumstance and then desperation.
She’d cook her first husband, whom she married at 21, recipes aimed at four people from a Cordon Bleu course she went on when she got
Extreme diets turn you into a kid in a candy shop when you eat normally
married. ‘He was a young trim man,’ so she ended up eating three portions.
She recalls somebody saying to her around this time, ‘“What is the most important thing to you?” And I answered, “I want to be slim.” It sounds terribly sad and selfish,’ she says now, ‘but I was so upset by the fact that I was overweight.’ Bar the love for her family and her continuing good health, I’d wager that being eight stone is still the most important thing to her.
Hating the conventional slimming clubs back then, Rosemary set up her own club, initially for herself and her neighbours, combining a 1,400- calorie-a- day diet with good grooming. She shifted two stone. But her marriage was in trouble: ‘It wasn’t working, although he was a lovely, lovely man.’
She left him in 1982 when their daughter Dawn was seven (he died last year). Six months later, she met Mike, then aged 23, on a pony-trekking holiday. She was 36.
By then, she’d had a hysterectomy (she has never pined for a bigger family). She later ended her relationship with Mike, the only ‘rock-bottom’ period of her life. She’s vague about the reason for the break-up, but she subsequently became ill with gallstones. In hospital, she read a free book called Power For Living, knelt down by her bed ‘and said a prayer to invite Jesus into my life. I knew my life was different from that second on. It utterly changed.’
Shortly afterwards, she got back with Mike and they married. That same year, she wrote The Hip and Thigh Diet based on a nutritional regime she had been following for medical reasons.
Losing the extra 7lb that took her from eight and a half stone to eight was a seminal moment. ‘I loved having slim thighs for the first time in my life.’
The books flew off the shelves and the money flew in.
The business collapse now seems to be firmly behind her. She’s full-square behind the new online venture and the new 3-2-1 Diet is attracting a lot of attention. By hanging in there, with a steely combination of stamina, perseverance and guts, her time seems to have come round again.
Rosemary Conley might just be the new ‘new’ – funny given that so many of us can still remember her from years before. n The 3-2-1 Diet by Rosemary Conley is published by Arrow Books, price €13.99