‘I would hate not to have the joy of food’ – why Dame Prue Leith gave up weight-loss jabs

Dame Prue Leith stopped using weight-loss jabs after a month, saying she couldn’t contemplate a life without hunger.

Fresh from her showstopping appearance on the catwalk at London Fashion Week in a Vin+Omi patterned orange suit, pink ruffled shirt and striking floral headpiece the day before her 86th birthday, the cook, writer, broadcaster and TV personality has opened up about her brief dalliance with weight-loss jabs.

Leith, who announced her departure from popular Channel 4 baking show The Great British Bake Off in January, says the jabs “worked perfectly” for her husband, retired fashion designer John Playfair, helping him become “healthier than anything”. This encouraged her to try it herself – but she says she didn’t pay enough attention to the instructions, meaning she “did not lose a single pound” for the month she was on it.

“What I didn’t really listen to was that you have to eat at least 1,500 calories a day, otherwise you’re in starvation mode,” she says. “In fact, I was so un-hungry, they affected me so strongly, that when we were on holiday, I just didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to go to the beach, I just wanted to lie down and sleep all the time, and I didn’t want to eat anything.”

Leith calculates that she was consuming around 200 calories a day, adding: “What your body then does is it simply says, ‘This is starvation, I mustn’t let anything go’. I did not lose a single pound, anything. I lost no weight.”

The cook says she “came off it very quickly”, realising it didn’t suit her lifestyle. “I like the fact that I look forward to my meals, and I’m a cook – my life has been about food. I would hate not to have the joy of food.”

Famed for her bold glasses, bright clothes and colourful necklaces, 300 of which hang on metal trees in her bedroom, Leith has addressed the topic of ageing in her new book, Being Old And Learning To Love It.

The book, like her, is a beacon of positivity, despite the creaking bones and the other painful elements which she has suffered over the years – the slipped discs, new knees, a torn shoulder.

Leith says she “takes everything with a great pinch of salt” when it comes to health and beauty. “If somebody tells me that there’s a miracle cure that all I need to do is pay £300 and a bottle of cream will make my wrinkles go away, I’d think it is an absolute con – you’d be better off with Nivea for £2.99,” she says.

She confesses that when filming The Great British Bake Off, she lived on a diet of red wine and cake.

“Cake and wine go together. It’s obviously not a diet to be recommended, but it worked fine for me. It’s only 10 weeks of my life, and it’s only two days of every week,” she says.

Leith announced in January that she was stepping down as a judge of the Channel 4 show after fronting it since 2017, saying a big part of her decision was because it is filmed over the summer.

“I could have happily gone on doing it forever – I know I will miss it, but I’m running out of time. I want to have another Italian holiday, I want to visit the south of France again. I want to go to Greece, which I’ve hardly visited at all, I want to see bits of Spain that I’ve never been to – but you want to see these places in the summer.”

So what of her replacement, cookbook author Nigella Lawson? “She is going to be absolutely brilliant. She’ll be very different, but she’s a class act, she really knows what she’s doing.

“She knows her onions – people will expect her to know about cake, which she certainly does, but what they won’t expect is how clever she is, how sharp, witty – she’s really erudite. She’s a fantastically clever woman.”

Leith says she “wouldn’t dream of giving advice” to Lawson on her new job as “she doesn’t need it”. But she does think of the pearl of wisdom that previous host Mary Berry gave her when she took on the role.

“I rang [Mary Berry] up before I did it, and she said: Paul [Hollywood] is lovely, and he really knows his [stuff], especially on bread. He’s really good at his job, and he could, frankly, do the job without you. He doesn’t really need a second judge, because he knows it all and is excellent at it. So be careful that you’re not just there for the banter. She said something like, make sure you get a fair crack.”

Leith plans on visiting the Bake Off set once more, as her “decision to leave was rather sudden”, and she “hadn’t said goodbye to anybody”.

The permanently busy Leith says she’ll still appear on our TV screens – and she certainly doesn’t have any plans to retire soon. The South African-born entrepreneur and businesswoman, who ran Leith’s School of Food and Wine and her own restaurant, wrote food columns and penned best-selling cookbooks, says she will always return to writing.

“I’m a writer, and writing is a disease – I can’t not do it,” she says. “My husband complains that there are three people in my bed – me, my wife, and the computer.”

In her new book, Leith writes lovingly about her first husband Rayne Kruger, a novelist and historian 20 years her senior, who died when Leith was 62. The couple shared two children, Danny (who is now a Reform UK MP), and adopted daughter Li-Da.

Life was less fun until she hit 70 and met Playfair, with whom she seems blissfully happy. He has four children and together they have 12 grandchildren, who keep them on their toes running around the fields of their modern house in the Cotswolds.

“I’ve always been very energetic and up for anything, including love and sex,” Leith notes, crediting HRT as a huge help.

“I’ve had an HRT patch on my bum since my 40s, when I had an hysterectomy, so they had to give me one because they took out my ovaries. Every five years or so, I get summoned by my NHS doctor to discuss my HRT, and they always say, do you realise there’s an increased risk of breast cancer?”

For Leith, the risk is “minute” and “the benefits so enormous”, so it’s a no-brainer.

In work and her personal life, Leith credits her longevity to being born with a naturally sunny outlook.

“I do think that a lot of my success has come from having a positive attitude. I generally am enthusiastic about things – I don’t like to ever say no, I’m pretty well always up for anything.

“So I’ve tried a lot of different things and gone to a lot of different places, and they sometimes haven’t worked, but mostly they have. I think if you have the attitude that things are going to be interesting, even if not necessarily smooth sailing, they probably will be.”

Leith confesses that she does think a lot about death and has been campaigning for some 15 years for assisted dying to be legalised, sparked after her brother David died a “slow and agonising” death from bone cancer.

As for her own legacy? “I do hope that when I die, I’d have done more good than harm.”

Being Old And Learning To Love It by Prue Leith is published in hardback by Short Books, priced £20. Available February 26.