Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
How I lost 12 stone (and fathered my first child)
When our columnist Tom Kerridge realised he was obese, he devised his very own dynamic diet. Now, as he shares it with you, he tells Rebecca Hardy there was a surprise in store...
Towards the end of last year Tom Kerridge stood with fellow chef Jason Atherton in Jason’s fancy Marina Social restaurant in Dubai chewing the fat. ‘ We were talking about how much had changed in the past couple of years. Can you believe I’ve lost a Jason – a whole person? It’s mental,’ he says. ‘Mental but amazing.’
What Tom means is that he’s shed his close friend’s entire body weight – 12 stone – in only three years. He now weighs just under 18 stone after cutting right down on carbs and ditching alcohol completely – an awful lot of alcohol it seems. ‘In our business it becomes an obsession to party, play hard, drink hard, eat rubbish food,’ he says. ‘You start drinking after the last bill’s been paid and then it will go right through until two or three in the morning. It’s a release from the pressures of working hard. But there’s a point where you get fed up. You think, “I’ve got to make a change.”’
Today Tom, who’s been Weekend’s cookery columnist for the past two years, can swim a mile in 36 minutes, race up six floors two stairs at a time and, well, it’s probably best to let him explain. ‘ Sex is different because you’re not going to bed drunk,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t something that was at a bad point. It was just different. Everything is different,’ he says. So very different, in fact, that just over a year ago Tom became a dad.
His son Acey was born on 21 December 2015. His wife Beth Cullen Kerridge, a talented sculptor whose 16ft-high marble Dhow Sail sculpture was recently unveiled at the Dubai Opera house (which is why Tom was there), was by all accounts ‘a brilliant pregnant person. So calm. So amazing.’ She’s here now in Tom’s two Michelin-starred eatery The Hand and Flowers in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, and is as warm and easy-going as Tom.
They both call Acey ‘Little Man’, even though he weighed a not-so-little 11lb 4oz when he was delivered by planned Caesarean two weeks early. ‘That was bananas,’ says Tom. ‘ You can’t put it into words. It’s a mental life- changer. It was something I never thought I’d have and then all of a sudden it’s there and you think, “This is amazing.” Life isn’t about you any more. It’s about him. He’s very much a part of our lives. By the age of 11 months he’d been to Italy four times, Cyprus, San
Francisco and Dubai. How cool is that? To be in Dubai with your son while Beth is opening a piece at the Dubai Opera house. He’ll be taking his grandkids there to see what his mum did. It’s mental.’
‘Mental’ and ‘cool’ crop up time and again when you’re talking to Tom. Indeed he’s so full of beans you can’t quite believe he was up until 3am with Little Man, who had ‘a bad night’. ‘Beth took over when he woke again at 5am,’ he says. ‘ It’s a tag team. We work it together, which is amazing.’ Since shedding a grown man the size of Jason Atherton he says he has a lot more energy, and he wasn’t short on that before. Sobriety helps too. Not so much as a nip of Scotch has passed his lips since 8 January 2013, which is the date his diet started. He calls it Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet and he’d researched just about every diet on the planet before putting it together.
The recipes, which are being serialised in this magazine today and next week, are a game-changer for anyone on a low-carb diet. Take, for example, his Asian Beef With Pak Choi And Radishes, or his Greek- style meatballs Keftedes With Parsley And Lemon Salad. Before I spoke to Tom, I tried them both out on my 20-year-old son, who has the appetite of a small army. They were so good, and substantial, my son thought I’d ordered them in.
A low carbohydrate intake lowers blood sugar levels causing the body to burn stored fat for energy, which leads to weight loss, explains Tom. ‘I try to stay below 90g of carbs a day. My recipe portions are me- sized, designed to satisfy a hungry bloke who’s on the go. If your lifestyle is a bit more sedentary, reduce the portion size a little. Many of my recipes are high in protein too, which helps you feel fuller for longer.
‘I spent ages researching diets and trying to find something that would work for me,’ he adds. ‘It was important to me to find something I could stick to in the long term, a style of eating I wouldn’t get bored with after a few weeks before sliding back into my old, bad-boy ways. I looked at our menu here and saw one of our bestselling main courses was steak and chips. Under a low-calorie or low-fat diet, I wouldn’t be able to eat that at all. But on a low-carb diet I realised I could eat at least 50 per cent of it.’
He stuck with the steak and swapped the chips for veg. Similarly spaghetti Bolognese just became Bolognese, and as for curry, well, he cut the rice, poppadoms and chapatis and knocked up flatbreads containing low-carb coconut flour. Also key
to eating Tom’s as diet many is foodsthe ethosas pos- of sible that help stimulate the production of the happiness hormone dopamine, such as dairy products, eggs, fish, fruit, grass- fed beef and and lamb, turkey, organic as pork,well as chicken nuts, vegetables and spices. ‘I’m sure this is why I’ve enjoyed the diet so much, and why I’ve been able to keep it up,’ he says.
Tom weighed 30st and was fast approaching his 40th birthday when he decided he had to do something. ‘I think your 40th is quite a big one because you think, “OK, where am I personally? Where am I professionally? And where do I see the future?” On a personal level my life was amazing. I’d been married for 13 years. Professionally, I’d just received my second Michelin star. But when I started looking at the future I thought, “I’m only halfway. Maybe I won’t be here if I keep going the way I am.”
‘ I’d been checked for diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol. No problem. I do a physical job and I was swimming every day but not losing any weight because I was eating badly and drinking. I knew I had to do something. We all know if you’re overweight it’s putting pressure on your heart and your joints. But we get told all the time, “You eat too much sugar or too much salt,” so we feel oppressed. Every time I went to the doctor I was being told I was drinking too much. If you’re like me you rebel. You think, “They’re telling me six pints is bad, are they? Well, I’m going to drink 12 then.” You just become anti being told what to do. I wanted to look at what’s good, not what’s bad. I thought, “Let’s celebrate the food we can eat.”’ Tom’s always been large. He says it never bothered him. Growing up in Gloucester, with many a night spent at the rugby club, he’s always been confident in his skin, which says much about him given his far-fromeasy childhood. One of two boys, he was 11 when his mum and dad, a lecturer in graphics, separated. His father suffered with multiple sclerosis and died when Tom was 18. ‘The last few years he was very ill,’ he says. ‘There was a person there but he didn’t take us to the cinema or anything like that, because he couldn’t move. ‘ It’s hard to see anybody suffer. It’s not a pleasant thing to experience or be a part of. Now, as an older bloke, I can recognise the frustrations he must have had. For somebody who’s creative, to have that taken away from him must have been incredibly frustrating, and even worse with the pain he must have been in. ‘But how many people come from a broken family? Mum was everything. She was a mother and a father figure who took us to the rugby. It’s not the easiest life, but I don’t think it’s until later that you think, “Oh God, she did really well.”’ Tom ended up in a kitchen because he ‘ needed to find something I was interested in and then I needed money so I ended up washing up. Everyone who works there is slightly more rock’n’roll. You’re with hard- working, hard- swearing chefs who take the p*** out of you. Party animals. It was a bit like being at an all- boys comprehensive only there’s knives and fire. I fell in love with that part of the industry. I thought, “This is cool. I like it.”’
By 21 Tom had hotfooted it to London, where the partying began in earnest. Two years later he met Beth at a mutual friend’s birthday party and three months later they were engaged. ‘ She went down on one knee at 1.30am in Leicester Square and a street sweeper was going past. He said, “Congratulations.” It was amazing. I was 23. We knew, we just knew.’ He says this without a smidgeon of smugness. Tom knows he’s blessed. He thanks his lucky stars on a daily basis. They married in 2000 and opened The Hand and Flowers in 2005, gaining the first Michelin star a year later.
They both worked very hard and played very hard. Tom began to put on weight. ‘It’s difficult when you open any business. You’re constantly juggling the books and you don’t know if it’s going to close the next day. For me, partying was a way of releasing the pressure. It’s not like you gain the weight overnight. It’s something that goes progressively. I reckon I put on the best part of 9st since I opened here.’
Did Beth complain? After all, 30st is a huge hunk of a man to cuddle up to at night. ‘No one ever said anything to me,’ he says. ‘It was a recognition I had that this was unsustainable for another ten years. We have the conversation now and she says, “I loved you then.” When we met we fell in love with each other as people – what we were trying to do, where we were trying to go. It’s never been about physicality. Great marriages are built on an understanding of each other, not how someone looks. Of course, you can be attracted to someone in the first place, but it’s something that becomes more deep-rooted. It’s about the person and then…’
The sentence peters out. And then? ‘ Then Little Man comes along. It hadn’t been something that was necessarily missing, but it’s the best thing. We’d reached a plateau in our lives where we were fitter, healthier and the business was fit too. We were at a point where we could say, “Now is quite good.” The timing couldn’t have been better. Suddenly life isn’t just about Michelin stars or TV. Two Michelin stars is something we’re very proud of, but that’s not all to do with me. That’s a team effort. But, Little Man, no one else had anything to do with that.’
Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet: My Low-Carb, Stay-Happy Way To Lose Weight, Absolute Press, £20.
‘I thought I won’t be here if I keep going the way I am’