My perpetual diet in battle with cakes and wine, by Bake Off Prue
AS a judge surrounded by sumptuous sponges and decadent desserts, it’s perhaps no wonder she worries about her waistline.
Now Bake Off’s Prue Leith has admitted she is on a ‘perpetual diet’ thanks to all the temptations that come her way.
The cook, 79, said she tries to balance her love of food with regular personal training sessions, and attempts to avoid too many glasses of wine.
In an interview with today’s Daily Mail Weekend magazine by Katherine Hassell, Miss Leith said: ‘Like most women I’m on a perpetual diet I never keep to.
‘I wake every morning thinking, “I’ll have no breakfast, very little lunch and not too many glasses of wine tonight”. By the end of the day, I’ve eaten my usual 2,000 calo-ries. But I do have a personal trainer who comes twice a week.’
Miss Leith said that while she tried to stick to her exercise regime, she was often relieved to miss a session or two.
‘I love it when she can’t come or I have to cancel,’ she said. ‘I hate it, and she knows I hate it. But I should keep doing it because I’m getting to be an old lady. I want to be able to get up the stairs.’
Her co-star, baker Paul Hollywood, agreed that judging the Channel 4 competition often involves eating one too many sugary treats. ‘In this year’s final, I judged my 500th challenge,’ he said. ‘That’s a lot of calories.’
But he insisted reports he went on a diet before each series are false, saying he simply drinks more water and enjoys horse riding for exercise. He and Miss Leith are back in the Bake Off tent for the new series, which starts on August 27.
Hollywood, 53, who recently split from his girlfriend Summer Monteys-Fullam, 24, offered some hints about this year’s bakers. One is a vet, one a truck driver and another a super fan who has followed the programme since childhood.
‘They shook hands with me in the second year of Bake Off,’ he revealed. ‘Now eight years later, they’re in the tent.’
Bake Off, which moved to Channel 4 from the BBC in 2016, has retained millions of viewers, in part thanks to the chemistry between the two judges. Miss Leith said of Hollywood: ‘He’s got such a filthy mind. He can make anything into something rude. And then he starts laughing.’