How I face dup to my fear of death... and learned to love myself 50 at

Terrified of looking this old under harsh studio lights, our breakfast TV star resorts to ever more bizarre life hacks (throat chakra, anyone?) to turn back time...

LAST week, Good Morning Britain star Kate Garraway confessed how approaching 50 had driven her to engage in a twoweek sex challenge with her husband, led to her embracing cosmetic tweaks – and even caused an excruciating underwear malfunction. Here, in the final extract of her new book on fighting midlife misery, she grapples with losing weight – and the most st terrifying topic of all, death...

IT’S not about how young you look, it’s about how young you feel – so says absolutely everyone. My trouble was that I didn’t feel young at all. I felt old and exhausted. Yes, I was turning 50, but I honestly felt I had the energy of an 80-year-old and life seemed to be spiralling out of control.

WRINKLES: Kate when she was artificially aged for a feature on television One morning, I spent an hour in a total panic looking for the belt that I’d taken off the night before, only to find it in the fridge. Meanwhile, there was a carton of milk on my chest of drawers... IT’S a bit of a joke among my friends that, although I’m very busy, active and constantly rushing around all over the place, I’ve always struggled to fit any ‘real’ exercise into my life. ‘Find something you can do in the odd moments in your day that will keep you toned,’ advised the super-fit Susanna Reid.

At Smooth Radio, I started doing arm dips and press-ups while we were on-air. Hotel California by the Eagles was playing – six minutes, 30 seconds – which I judged perfect for a five-minute upper body workout.

The Smooth studio is in the same building as other radio stations, such as Capital and Heart, and the walls between them are made of glass, so we can see the other presenters who are onair at the same time, doing their thing in their studios. My old Daybreak mate, Aled Jones, who was on-air on Classic FM in the studio right next to mine, spotted the activity and rushed to join in during one of his long symphonies.

Then Andrew Castle, who was passing by on the way to present his LBC show, saw what was going on. Ever the competitive sportsman, he came in and started trying to outdo Aled in the number of one-handed press-ups he could complete in a minute. It was so chaotic that I nearly missed the end of the song and had to rush to the mic before we ended up with silence, or ‘dead air’, which is obviously a big no-no in radio.

To improve my flexibility, I figured I needed to stretch.

‘Yoga, yoga, yoga,’ said my friend, broadcaster and author Penny Smith. ‘Really? Yoga?’ I said with a sigh of defeat.

Penny loves yoga. She’d happily hang out all day in a pair of billowy trousers eating beansprouts and balancing on her head. But she looks spectacularly great for fifty-whatever-it-is. So any advice she had to offer was definitely worth listening to. ‘If you can’t do yoga as often as me,’ she said, ‘keep up the swimming and have a deep-tissue massage every now and then. That’ll do it.’ AT WORK one day I met my friend Clare Nasir, former GMTV weather presenter, now the face of Channel 5 weather, for a quick coffee. I could hardly believe how fantastic she looked. She had lost a dramatic amount of weight, yet looked healthy and beaming bright. What the heck?

‘I’ve been on the keto diet,’ she said with a grin. In some ways it’s hard not to be a bit cynical when a friend tells you about their fantastic new diet, because there’s a fresh eating fad in the press every day.

Some of them sound reasonable, others entirely ludicrous, and every December, the British Dietetic Association (BDA) duly puts out a list of the worst. The Super Elixir, the SugarFree, the Clay Cleanse and the Bulletproof diet all get the BDA thumbs down for being unscientific, vitamindeficient or so difficult to stick to that they end up being socially isolating. Eat a spoonful of ‘detoxifying clay’ every morning? Start the day with a cup of coffee with a big lump of butter in it? It’s pure whimsy, apparently.

Fat used to be the enemy and carbohydrate a friend. Now they’re swapping sides. It feels as if nutritional advice is constantly changing. Will we ever find out for sure what’s really good for us?

I have always felt so bombarded with dietary advice that always seemed to make me feel guilty about the ‘naughty’ food I secretly preferred, that I switched off and ate what I fancied. But now, with my energy and health at a new low ebb, even I could see this really wasn’t good enough any more. And so with Clare sitting in front of me looking amazing and totally transformed, I forced myself to listen.

The keto diet works by replacing carbs with fat, which lowers blood sugar and insulin levels and encourages your body to burn fat instead of glucose for energy. Crucially, the body also turns fat into ketones in the liver, and ketones have been shown in studies to stop the brain degenerating.

I love the idea of a diet that can protect against Alzheimer’s and senile dementia, because that’s very high up on the list of everyone’s fears about old age.

Going on the ketogenic diet in its

ctest form requires medical superon, especially if you have an existhealth condition such as diabetes. an be a shock to the system to cut sugar and carbohydrates altoher and some people could experie an extreme reaction. here’s also a certain amount of ing involved, as there is on the 5:2 so many other diets. I decided to the keto diet because Clare looked antastic, and she seemed confit that it would improve my mental ty and tiredness. ere’s what happened: ay One: My first big shock was everybody at Good Morning Britthinks I’m a total sugar fiend. mittedly, I hadn’t really noticed I was in the habit of reading the s with my Celebrations chocolates dily placed so I could snaffle them by one during the ad break. ay Three: I’ve discovered that ng a sugar-free breakfast is very ky when you’re busy. I tried bringin a boiled egg, but it’s fiddly to ember to boil it the night before and also to remember to get it out of the fridge at 2.30 in the morning. Plus they stink. Ben Shephard, my co-presenter, was disgusted. ‘What fresh hell is this new breakfast?’ he asked, wrinkling his nose as I peeled my egg at 3.30am. He has already (prediet) banned me from eating toast and Marmite, because he hates the smell of Marmite first thing, too.

Day Four: This morning I brought in an avocado, which has good fat, omega-3, potassium, riboflavin and vitamins A, B, C and E among its dizzying array of nutrients. But avocados are fraught with trauma. You buy them and they’re too hard. Then they’re suddenly ripe and get squished in your handbag. So far I’ve ruined two forms that I was supposed to fill in for my daughter Darcey to take back to school – now smeared with avocado mush – and a beautiful purse that my husband Derek bought for me. The whole thing is rife with annoyance.

Day 21: This is my last day on the keto and I’m certain it’s done me good. I’ve been eating less, drastically reduced my sugar intake and cut out all the other rubbish in my diet. But it is too extreme for me because I think there’s nothing wrong with good sugars – with eating an apple or a banana, say – and I want to have a tomato or a potato occasionally. THERE are lots of scary things about getting older, but one of the biggest, I guess, is death itself. Especially in midlife, when we suddenly wake up to the fact we may have fewer years left than we have already lived. It certainly frightened me. It increasingly dominated my thoughts, waking me up in the night in cold sweats. I couldn’t really understand then why it gripped me so suddenly and so much, but it did. And no amount of jokey comments like‚ ‘Don’t think about it, there’s nothing you can do anyway’, could take the fear away.

So I decided that, if I was going to really be master of myself in midlife – and tackle all the things that scared me about ageing – I had to take on my biggest fear of all and stare it down. And the results were amazing, lifechanging even.

A friend recommended seeing a healer who works with terminally ill people to help them come to terms with their own end.

That’s how I ended up in a room in West London talking about my fear of death with Annie Penny, a trained healer, counsellor and therapist. Annie uses techniques that draw upon the parts of the world where death isn’t so feared, but instead working towards a good death is seen as a positive goal of life. She practises an emotional release technique commonly known as ‘tapping’, or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and goes beyond releasing emotions into clearing the chakras, which are the seven centres of spiritual power in the body central to yoga, meditation and Ayurveda.

EFT works by stating your greatest fear out loud and tapping meridian points on your body at the same time. I started by saying: ‘I fear death.’ I had to keep saying it over and over again.

‘What about death do you actually fear?’ she asked, tapping away.

She had to ask the question several times before I could say: ‘I think it’s the not knowing.’

Now she had something to work with, she encouraged me to say: ‘Even though I have this fear of not knowing what death is, I love and accept myself completely.’

It’s the sort of thing that instinctively I want to run a mile from. It sounded like such hippy drivel, and all that ‘accept myself’ – so Oprah!

All my self-doubting and utter lack of self-confidence surged up to reject it, but I over-ruled it. Let’s give it a go, I thought.

‘I think it’s the “aloneness” of it,’ I said. ‘The fact that even if someone is holding your hand, at the moment you actually die you have to pass over on your own, with no one to guide you – not knowing.’ Suddenly I was unable to speak or breathe. My throat was so constricted it felt as if somebody had their hands around it. I started to cough and struggle for breath. ‘Are you having a reaction?’ she asked. ‘I can’t really speak. My throat feels really tight, like I am being strangled,’ I croaked.

‘This is brilliant!’ she declared. ‘It’s your throat chakra, which controls communication, emotional selfexpression and truth.’

It was hilarious that she was so positive about it! I was thinking, this is

not brilliant, I could be choking here and facing my fear of death by actually dying! But I suppose it’s one way to cure it...

It was an amazing session. Annie helped me unlock what I find fearful, break it down and tease it apart. It was a great way to release instinctual fears and I was able to let some of the anxiety go and feel much calmer.

I have a tendency to over-analyse things, so when I tried to write down my thoughts and fears in preparation for the session, it was all coming from the front of my brain. After I put myself in Annie’s hands, a lot of stuff came out that I wouldn’t otherwise have had access to. The key is forcing yourself to stop and think about what’s really bothering you, in an unconscious rather than intellectual way.

I ruined a beautiful purse – by squashing avocado on it I felt I might chokec to death. My counsellor was delighted