How I Move Tess Daly
Daily yoga exercises and wholesome diet help keep presenter in positive frame of mind to cope with the challenges of lockdown
I do yoga every day – it helps put me in the moment.
Your mind may wander a little bit, but you are concentrated on that little act of self-love, and I think the rest of your day rolls better for that. You are in a more positive mindset as a result and you feel more resilient.
I started yoga again after I had my second child and now I do it religiously.
When I used to live in New York, I would take almost daily yoga classes there, but I let it slip when I moved back to the UK and became a mother for the first time. Becoming a parent, you carry that child on your hips for three years – you are constantly picking them up, bending, scooping, lifting – and my hip would fall out of line as a result. I was advised to take up pilates or yoga again. Pilates was too detail-focused for me, whereas yoga worked – it puts me in a good head space and it just helps keep you limber and moving.
Flexibility is key – the great Bruce Forsyth taught me that.
He would do stretching exercises morning and night, every day religiously for 50 years. And
I have never seen someone in their late eighties with posture like that, it was incredible. He had posture like a dancer. I think it is really important.
I was a skinny kid, too skinny, and had no body confidence. Then I got into modelling, the fashion world, where everything is based on how you look. But I soon realised that it was other people’s projections. I would have an agent who would tell me I needed to lose weight, and then two weeks later they would say, ‘You need to gain weight’. Hang on a minute, I am wearing the same size jeans, nothing has changed – this is your perception of me.
I realised that there was no point letting this affect me
– I cannot change how people see me, I can only be my best self and keep myself healthy.
Working on camera for 30 years has made me more resilient and pragmatic.
I am down to earth and take things with a pinch of salt because, despite being judged on how you look on the outside, I do believe that what you feel on the inside is what you radiate.
I am in my fifties and I feel exactly the same as I did in my thirties.
I know I look different, but working out and yoga is all about maintaining that sense of well-being and quality of life. It makes me feel stronger physically, and health is everything – we have nothing without it.
Food is all we have right now, so mealtimes are the highlight of the day.
It’s my personal challenge to satisfy my teenage daughters’ meal preferences, requirements, and constantly changing tastes. But I enjoy the challenge, it is about looking after them from the inside out.
I believe a happy gut cultivates calm while an
Flexibility is key – Bruce Forsyth did stretching exercises morning and night for 50 years
unhappy gut cultivates anxiety – and we do not need any more of that right now.
For well-being, keeping myself healthy, it all begins in the gut. So my family’s lifestyle is based around healthy foods. We are sort of 80 per cent vegetarian, and I have not had red meat since I was in my teens.
Self-love has never been more important.
We are all trying to boost our well-being, the odds are stacked against us, but we can cultivate it in the little things. Whether it is a hot bubble bath, a stretch class online or yoga class. It is taking those 20 minutes for yourself and giving yourself a little bit of you-time, doing something that nurtures your well-being. It is more beneficial than ever right now, because it helps us feel that we are in control.
Despite being judged on how you look, I believe that what you feel on the inside is what you radiate
When we are all busy with the small details of our lives, you put yourself on the back-burner.
Often the first thing you sacrifice is that time for yourself – whether it is your workout or yoga. But when I do not do yoga, and have four or five days out, I feel the consequences of abandoning that practice. I have forced myself to get back into it, and I cannot recommend that highly enough.
Even though we are in lockdown, I will try to drag out the kids on a walk every day.
It is difficult to do it after Zoom school lessons, but we try to focus on future plans and goals, too. There is so much negativity and uncertainty right now, we are trying to remind them good is just around the corner.
Tess Daly has partnered with Activia to support its 14-day #Activiachallenge. To take part visit https://www.danoneactivia.
Hollywood must have lost its collective mind to ignore the tale of Jackie Mitchell’s golden day. The cast and plot have all the ingredients of a blockbuster: the most famous ballplayer who ever lived, two of his hall of fame contemporaries and, at the centre of it, a 17-year-old woman, only the second to play professional baseball, who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Mitchell was a pitcher who had been coached as a young girl by her neighbour, Charles ‘Dazzy’ Vance. She would go on to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and join Ruth and Gehrig in the game’s Valhalla at Cooperstown. She played women’s basketball as well as baseball and was summoned back from a basketball tour to Chattanooga, to sign for the Lookouts, a farm team for the Major League Washington Senators, on the eve of an exhibition match against the New York Yankees.
Joe Engel, the president of the Lookouts, filled his ballpark with a variety of stunts over the years and with dwindling ticket sales during the Depression hired the Yankees, fresh from spring training, to draw a sell-out crowd. Mitchell was a ‘lefty’, pitching with a side-arm technique and had perfected the sinking curveball.
Engel was not blind to the promotional, but if it was only a gimmick, it smacks of gilding the lily. This was the New York Yankees and ‘the Bambino’, ‘Iron Horse’ and ‘Poosh ‘Em Up’ Tony Lazzeri – three of the famous ‘Murderers’ Row’ batting line-up.
Still, the press treated Mitchell’s place in the team as a ruse in the build-up.
Indeed Mitchell was pictured in the previews playing up to the hype, powdering her nose and applying her make-up. Posing with Ruth and Gehrig for photographs, the two legends in Yankee pinstripe, the teenager almost drowned in her voluminous uniform.
Coming into the game as a reliever to pitch to Ruth, she threw one ball followed by two dipping strikes at which Ruth had swung hard. Next she threw in the corner of the strike zone and the pitch sailed past Ruth’s stroke. When the umpire called ‘Strike three’, Ruth threw his bat and stomped off.
Enter Gehrig, who also went hard at Mitchell, missing three straight pitches and he, too, struck out. After walking Lazzeri, she was pulled from the game. “Jackie probably remembered she was a woman, and after all that excitement she undoubtedly wanted to go off and have a good cry,” wrote the Washington Post. ‘Hell, yes, they tried. But better hitters than them couldn’t hit me’
In the 80 years since it has often been claimed that Ruth and Gehrig had been knobbled by Engel. Though Ruth tipped the press a wink, it
could have been to save face and Gehrig was not the kind of man to soil his reputation for a couple of bucks.
Lazzeri did not think they were in cahoots with Engel. What is known is that Kenesaw Landis, Baseball Commissioner, ordered that Mitchell’s contract be cancelled straightaway. A formal ban on women playing with men in major and minor leagues did not come into place until 1952 – which would last for 40 years – but there was no way back.
Mitchell returned to the women’s game and made good money on the exhibition circuit playing for the House of David team from a biblical sect. But she grew tired of the burlesque, pitching atop a pony, wearing a beard to match her team-mates in ‘The Jesus Boys’. At the age of 23 she retired, turning down all requests to return for the wartime Allamerican Girls’
Professional Baseball League.
Asked shortly before her death in 1987 whether she really did “fan” Ruth and Gehrig legitimately, she said: “Hell they were trying. Damn right.
Better hitters than them couldn’t hit me.”