Huw: I ballooned to 161/ stone while 2 mourning my dad
BBC newsreader Huw Edwards has revealed how his weight ballooned to 16 ½ stone as he suffered from depression while struggling to accept his father’s death.
Edwards, 58, said he turned to comfort eating as a means of dealing with an ‘ overwhelming’ feeling of helplessness.
The father of five said: ‘It was a proper kind of depression about how I felt and where I felt I was, and my dad and everything.
‘I felt it had become rather overwhelming. The worst thing was I felt I couldn’t do anything about anything. I felt a bit helpless.’
Professor Hywel Edwards died f r o m c a ncer in 2010 j us t ten days after the broadcaster broke the news to him that his condition was terminal.
Edwards said he never had a ‘touchy-feely’ relationship with his father but that his failure to properly process his death stored up problems for the future. He added: ‘ It was tough at the time, but I allowed myself to think that I’d come to terms with it, but that was such a stupid and naive thing to think. What I found was that this crept up on me.
‘So by 2016, 2017, I had put on a lot of weight. I felt dreadful… I’d eat when I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t doing any fitness. I was grazing, watching telly and eating stuff, even though I didn’t need it.’
Edwards said t he eureka moment a b o u t h i s h e a l t h came when he had to run for a train at Paddington station in West London, and ‘I honestly thought I was going to expire’.
‘ I couldn’t breathe, I was sweating profusely.’ The presenter said he surprised himself by agreeing to take up boxing three times a week at a local gym.
He lost 3st through a regime of floor exercises, bag work and sparring, although he admitted to having gained a few pounds during lockdown.
But he added that getting fit physically has made him ‘ment ally more robust’ and his depression has entirely lifted.
Such resilience has stood him in good stead in his 35- year career at the BBC, including 17 anchoring the 10pm news.
Edwards said getting by at the corporation was tough, adding: ‘You have to be a street fighter to survive.
‘You have to learn some skills in survival, especially in the BBC, which actually can be a treacherous place sometimes.’
The journalist, who was interviewed for The Times magazine yesterday, also revealed how in March he was struck down by probable Covid- 19. He had pneumonia and lost his sense of taste and smell. He was ‘flattened’ for almost a month and three antibody tests have since come back positive.
Edwards also confirmed he accepted a £120,000 salary cut in 2018 amid the BBC’s gender pay gap row.
He admitted he would rather not have lost 20 per cent of his pay but wanted to be able to look female colleagues in the eye.
He now e a r ns less t han £500,000 a year, having previously been listed as earning between £550,000 and £599,000 in the BBC rich list, which ranks the pay of its star presenters. He added: ‘I felt it was the right thing to do.’