‘I’m so keen for people my age to get moving’
As her autobiography is published, fitness guru Rosemary Conley reveals why she has no intention of slowing down at 75
On the surface, Rosemary Conley appears to have had a good life. She’s been the nation’s go-to fitness guru for more than 30 years, her books have sold in their millions, her diet and fitness clubs were franchised across the country and she is a familiar face on TV.
But in her new autobiography, Through Thick And Thin, she reveals she has faced some major difficulties. “I think there are lots of things in the book that people don’t know about me, and one of those is that I was a very poorly child,” she says. “My lungs were underdeveloped, and still are, and doctors had warned my parents that I was unlikely to reach my 10th birthday. In fact, my current doctor said that if I had not followed the career that I have my life would be very different.
I do believe that my career has saved my life.”
She describes the book, which took her six years to write, as a story of resilience. As well as her health issues, she suffered an unhappy first marriage, which led her to form an unhealthy relationship – “bordering on an eating disorder” – with food.
“I would binge and I would starve, and even though it was nobody’s fault, I realise now that it came about because I was unhappy,” she says. “The turning point for me was when I worked out my own calorie allowance of 1,400 and it was that which prompted me to start my own slimming clubs. I gradually got control over my eating and my weight, and I became fascinated with the subject.”
Rosemary started an exercise class in her kitchen, then in the hall of the Leicestershire village where she lived. Within six months she’d given up her secretarial job to concentrate on the business and eight years later had 50 classes across the country. She was then approached by publisher IPC, which wanted a chain of fitness classes to complement magazine Successful Slimming.
By 1982, after separating from her husband of 14 years, Phil, she was happier. “Phil and I did love each other but the marriage wasn’t good. It sounds bonkers, but we got on so well that when we separated it felt like we were simply living in different houses. There was no angst between us at all and we got on better when we weren’t living together. But I can’t regret our marriage because we had a wonderful daughter, Dawn.”
‘My daughter is the greatest blessing of my life’
Rosemary had been told she was infertile after the loss of one of her fallopian tubes several years earlier. So in 1975, when she took a pregnancy test after feeling unwell, she was astonished to discover she was pregnant.
She says, “It was a huge shock because we’d tried for a long time and it hadn’t worked, and although I thought having children wasn’t something I craved, looking back I think I probably told myself that as a defence mechanism. I was absolutely and utterly thrilled to be pregnant and I loved being a mum and all the fun that goes with that. My daughter is the greatest blessing to me.”
Not long after her split from Phil, Rosemary met Mike on a pony trekking weekend. They began dating and a few months later moved in together and married in 1986. But their path to happiness was a complicated one. Challenges in their professional lives put a strain on their relationship and they separated twice.
“We have the most fantastic marriage now, but the reason I wrote about it is because