Amanda: How I look like this — without dieting
Amanda Holden eats what she likes - and loves a glass of wine. So what IS her secret? Read on ...
ONLY IN YOUR UNMISSABLE INSPIRE
Amanda Holden ‘badly’ wants a glass of rosé. So much so, she’s eyeing a bottle in an ice bucket on the next-door table with the longing of a Britain’s Got Talent contestant lusting after a Golden Buzzer pass to the semi-finals.
In this year’s series, amanda hit hers for 22-year-old singer Gruffydd Wyn Roberts, and today the nightly live rounds begin. For now, though, she’s basking on the roof terrace of Soho House in london, and wishing...well, that she could chill here all afternoon.
‘I’m looking over there,’ she gestures to a
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table of three blokes, jackets off, ties loosened. ‘oh, I badly want a glass of rosé.
‘You have to enjoy life. I eat everything. drink everything. I had a friend once who didn’t make it to her 50s and her biggest regret was she spent her life on a diet. I don’t diet.’
Hang on amanda. You don’t diet? ever? ‘I go
A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished
to a fitness camp in Portugal before the live shows. I’m a vegetarian, so for me it’s lots of avocado, chickpeas, and quinoa salads as well as hikes and boxing. It’s really good for your mindset, rather like unplugging your computer and plugging it back in.
‘There are an awful lot of people who watch BGT [more than 8 million last year] so I want to look the best I can. alesha dixon is the same. BGT is like going into the boxing ring. You train for it. You look your best for it and then you do the rounds.
‘But the entire thing only takes up a few weeks. You can’t live like that all the time. I practise a form of yoga, which is more to do with breath control and strength than getting sweaty, and I run every morning, but I love a glass of wine and going out.’ She lounges back and tugs her skirt above her knees to catch the sun.
at 47, amanda has the sort of toned legs most 20-year-olds would gladly borrow for a first date. She looks so arresting the rosé-swilling blokes are eyeing her up as much as she did their ice bucket. What’s her secret?
‘Collagen wave therapy,’ she says referring to a revolutionary treatment where skin is blasted with radio frequency waves to stimulate collagen and tighten the surface of the face.
‘I drink loads of water — a lot of coconut water — but I think it’s genetic because my nan looks amazing at 97. I also think having children as an older mum — or “geriatric mum”...’ She wrinkles her nose in distaste at the term once used to denote older mums, as well she might.
AManda, who has two daughters, Lexi, 12, and hollie, six, gave birth to her youngest at 41. doctors now describe a woman who is pregnant over the age of 35 as being of ‘advanced maternal age’. Which is just as well. amanda looks about as ‘geriatric’ as a teenager.
‘You just have to keep going when you have children. You’re constantly haring around,’ she says. ‘I do eat healthily but I have treats and I do love — I know I sound like an alcoholic — my glass of wine or gin. Life is too short to be strict.’
amanda knows this more than most. Six years ago she died for 40 seconds when an artery burst after giving birth to her youngest daughter. It followed the stillbirth of her son, Theo, seven months into her pregnancy the year before, which she spoke about with raw honesty in a moving ITV interview last week to mark the 70th anniversary of the nhS.
‘I had grief counselling when I lost the baby,’ she tells me. ‘My husband and I were both diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. I felt I’d run out of petrol. I’ve always been self-sufficient and able to get on with life. I’ve never been so crushed I couldn’t get back up, but I didn’t have any tools left.
‘My agent at the time knew this amazing woman whom I went to see two or three times. She gave me different ways to think about things, which helped to bring me out of it.
‘I think the PTSd was more to do with hollie’s birth than Theo. The placenta was attached to my main artery, which didn’t show up on the scan,’ she explains. ‘When they delivered the placenta, my artery burst. My husband thought he’d stepped in a bucket of water. he was ankle deep in my blood. It was horrendous for him. I didn’t know anything about it because I was in a coma, but for him it was terrible to be told to prepare Lexi for no mummy coming home.’
amanda’s resilience after being so desperately ill is extraordinary, and a mark of the determination that made the girl from the hampshire village of Bishop’s Waltham one of the best known women on TV.
‘It was touch and go for me, but ten days later I went on BGT. no one’s getting my seat!
‘I always say to Simon Cowell: “no one else would come out of a coma, come back and sit next to you”.’
She laughs loudly. This relaxed,
glass-of-wine-and-chill Amanda really is huge fun. She’s also a deep thinking, deep feeling woman who moves from irreverence to earnestond. ness in a seco ‘I call it survival,’ she says. ‘you put on your lip gloss, you put on your eyeyou lashes, and go out. My daughters have always known Mummy works. If anyone buzzes on the door my children always think it’s my hairdresser — “Oh my god, where are you going?” ’e laughs before sitting again, she her chair. Her very pretty forward in n now. ‘It’s 100 per cent survival. My mum went to work. My nan worked. I work. My sister [Debbie, 46, who was involved in a serious car accident 18 months ago] works her a**e off. We area strong, matriarchal family. ‘I like to be busy. That’s another reason I went back to work. I didn’t want to think. The fact I had died . . . and my own mortality...and thinking every time I had a headache I had a brain tumour and I was going to die...’ She swallows to stem her tears. ‘I never cared about dying until I had children because I didn’t want them not to have a mummy. ‘I’m like one of those horses with blinkers on. I constantly look forwards. When I went back to BGT after having Hollie I took her to Birmingham [for the regional heats]. That’s where I’d been the day before I realised I’d lost Theo. To go back with a baby in my arms was like, “We’ve done that. Survived it. Let’s go forward”.’ The ‘we’ includes her husband Chris Hughes. He is a solid, gentle man who works as a record producer, but prefers to stay out of the spotlight so rarely accompanies Amanda to the red carpet events that are part of her job. They met in the front row of a fashion show 15 years ago, after Amanda’s first marriage to comedian Les Dennis had ended. Chris took her out for dinner that night and has been the most important part of her life ever since.
‘I’ll catch a glimpse of him in the distance and go: “Oh he’s fit”, then I realise: “Oh, it’s Chris”!’
He is her ‘absolutely everything’, her ‘adviser’, her ‘calm in a storm’.
‘I say we’re like the plus and minus on a battery. you can’t have one without the other. I’d give up everything if he wasn’t comfortable with it.
‘We bicker a lot, but he also makes me laugh. Even during the difficult year we had with our babies, we were very dark humoured. We found a lot to laugh about.’ Such as? ‘It’s so sick nobody would get it. In our house we’re like Beetlejuice. She is referring to Tim Burton’s black comedy about a recently deceased couple who haunt their former home.
‘I love my life now. I am constantly touching wood. But you have the foundations because you’ve seen tragedy and recognised loss.
‘It’s amazing to be able to look across your life and think, I am really grateful for everything that’s happened to me because it’s prepared me for, probably, the worst thing ever. That’s what everything was leading to and now, thankfully, the rubbish is all over.’
She reaches out to touch the mockwood-effect table — ‘Oh, this is metal!’ — and roars with laughter.
‘There’s still more though. I appreciate everything I’ve got but still go, “this is looking lovely and I’m spinning all the plates but there’s another plate over there I’d like to spin”.’
Most recently that means her interiors collection, BundleBerry, for QVC UK, which includes cushions, throws and pieces of furniture influenced by her childhood in the Seventies.
‘I’ve got a chair that was based on one my grandmother had in her spare room which is why it’s called the Ethel. She hates her name so can’t believe I’d call anything that. The throws, the blankets — everything has come from loving the Seventies. It’s linked to my childhood and not having anything much.’
Amanda’s biological father left when she was three. She has little memory of him so considers her stepfather Les to be ‘Dad’.
‘They had no money,’ she says. ‘My dad was a second-hand car dealer. Things got better as we got older and they made their own luck by running a guesthouse in Bournemouth. They now have a thatched cottage by the sea in Cornwall, which is what my mum wanted when she was ten.
‘When I was younger I felt I wanted to move away from the village and be successful and give my mum and dad everything they’ve given me.’
SHE and her family have a house in Richmond and a 600-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds. ‘We love the Cotswolds because I don’t associate work with that place,’ she says. ‘School runs, homework, phone calls — everything happens in London.
‘Nothing happens in the Cotswolds except the swinging of swings and the drinking of wine. I’d live there [all the time] if I didn’t have my job.
‘As you get older you realise your family are the only people who truly give a damn about you. The truth is my family is my life. Simon Cowell’s the same. His relationship with Eric is beyond anything. To imagine him with a child is something I could never comprehend just because of his life.
‘I used to think it was a shame because he was always so good with other people’s children, but I never imagined him toilet training a child and cutting up somebody’s fish fingers. It’s been a great thing for him.’
She’s less forthcoming about her co-star Ant McPartlin, who has been in rehab battling drink and painkiller addiction after pleading guilty to drink-driving after a crash in March. Ant won’t be on BGT’s live semi-final tonight, and it’s unknown when, or if, he will return to the show. Amanda says she hasn’t heard from him.
A few days later we speak again while she’s at her Portuguese boot camp. If there was any doubt about the energy and resolve with which she trains for these live finals, and frankly how impressively fit she is for a woman nearing 50, you only need to look at the extraordinary videos and pictures she posts on her Instagram.
But it’s more than this. Unlike many celebrities I’ve met, there’s a genuine joy about Amanda that, I’m sure, has more to do with the way this funny, vibrant woman looks than any juice fast, boxing workout or hill climb could ever deliver.