At a time when our wellbeing is more important than ever, TV presenter and home exercise queen Davina McCall tells Emma Higginbotham how she’s staying on top of lockdown life.
“Sorry if I’m sounding out of breath, I'm walking up quite a steep hill,” pants Davina McCall who, fittingly for a fitness guru, is in the throes of her exercise hour when Weekend calls to chat about her lockdown experience.
“I have good days and bad days,” admits the 52-year-old, who’s abiding by the stay-at-home rules with her children Holly, 18, Tilly, 16 and Chester, 13. “Sometimes we’ll all be laughing over a meal, and I’ll think ‘Wow, this is lovely!’ Then on other days everybody’s having a meltdown and I can’t fix it, and we’re all in a pressure cooker.
“Part of me wants to say it’s hard, and then part of me thinks look, you get to go out in the countryside with your dog every day! And I’ve got three big kids, but imagine being a single mum with little children, and how hard that must be? There’s always somebody worse off than me, so I use that to get perspective.”
Like everyone, the sunny TV presenter, who co-hosted Comic Relief and Children In Need’s Big Night In last week, is having to find her own ways of coping with the strange new world that 2020 has thrust upon us.
“The biggest thing that’s helped me is having a rigorous routine,” she says. “I wake up at seven, I make my bed, I have a shower and I shave my legs, even though I’m not going anywhere; I don’t let my personal standards slip because mentally that’s not a good place to be. The temptation to waft around in a dressing gown all day is great, but it doesn’t make me feel good.”
Breakfast and a dog walk is next on the agenda, “and then I write a list of things that I want to get done that day. As a nation we’re all slightly flailing around, and the way I combat chaos is order: order in my house, order in my head. Lists!”
Exercise-wise, the queen of fitness DVDs – she has 14 under her (slim-waisted) belt – is keeping herself typically toned. “Obviously I do my hour, which I love, but it’s a brisk walk and I need a bit more than that to keep me in the shape that I like to be in.” Having said that, she only did a short workout yesterday. “To myself, bizarrely, on Own Your Goals.”
An online fitness platform, Own Your Goals has workouts ranging from boxing and cardio to yoga and dance by Davina and seven other trainers. “Exercise is key to getting us through this, and I think people’s attitudes to home workouts might change because of it,” she says. “They’ll realise that travelling to a gym is time-consuming and expensive; you could do 45 minutes at home, done, dusted, and it’s an amazingly good way of staying fit.”
As for eating well, Davina, who’s written four cookbooks, is all about keeping it simple. “My big thing is ease. Cooking is a great thing, but nobody wants to do it if it’s going to be a great big faff for hours. I don’t mind doing that for a dinner party, but for every night, it’s got to be quick and easy. My passion is one-pot cooking. I just love chucking everything into a pot, putting it in the oven and leaving it.
“In lockdown in particular, it’s about trying to find healthy snacks, because I don’t know about you but I just want to eat so much! I think it’s boredom, and I’m quite glad I don’t drink anymore, because a big risk is ‘I'm bored, I’ll just have a glass of wine’, and one glass turns into half a bottle.”
For Davina, one of the toughest parts is being separated from her boyfriend, celebrity hairdresser Michael Douglas, who’s spending the lockdown with his two teenage sons. The couple host a weekly podcast, Making the Cut, in which they review everything from Instagram accounts to mascara, and they’re carrying on despite their microphones being many miles apart.
“I miss him so much, it’s terrible! But he’s where he needs to be,” she says. “We do our podcast remotely, and it’s my favourite time of the week. I love it.”
Yet in spite of life’s current limitations, Davina is optimistic about how we’ll all fare – and what will matter most – when it’s over.
“I think we’ll appreciate human contact in a way that we’ve never appreciated it before,” she says. “I miss hugs! And having unfettered access to family: my sister lives in Australia, she’s got a brand new baby, and I’ve no idea when I’ll be able to see her again.
“But I think this has made us kinder,” she concludes. “I see lots of lovely neighbourhood acts happening and, when you come out to clap for carers, suddenly you get to know the people who live next door to you. And it doesn’t matter how much money you have, it’s not going to keep you alive, but an NHS worker could. This has made heroes out of our NHS, and that will stay with us forever.”
Chilling with chilli
“Last night we had my pork chilli, and what I love about it is you can just put anything in it,” says Davina. “I use pork because it’s very lean, and a gut health doctor told me that rather than using one type of bean, use a can of mixed beans and you’re suddenly getting five different types of fibre.”
Other ingredients include onion, red pepper, garlic, cumin, oregano, hot sauce, tinned tomatoes and the all-important sweet potato. “I put sweet potato in because my kids will have rice with it, but I don’t,” she explains. “As a nation we are used to enormous portions, and we don’t need them! My kids will get a bigger portion than me, because they need it – they burn calories sitting down because they’re growing – but I don’t.
“It’s about looking at food and thinking ‘Do I need this? Is this good for me?’”
Avoiding snack attacks
“People are having very different experiences of the lockdown,” says Joanne Lunn, Partner and senior nutritionist. “Some are doing much more exercise than they normally would, because they’re embracing online fitness and using their exercise hour to get out. But equally some people are really struggling, and have become much more sedentary if they’re stuck at their desks, and are snacking mindlessly.
“Try to stick to three meals a day, maybe with a couple of snacks to keep energy levels up, but avoid constant grazing. It is really difficult when everything is so close to you – you’re usually a lot further away from your biscuit tin and snacking cupboard!
“If you’re very hungry it’s often difficult to make good food choices, because you’ll just grab whatever you can find. So when you’ve got a bit of time, prep some snacks so that when you’re hungry and time-pressured, you can just go and grab something quick.
“A handful of dried fruit, mixed nuts, rice cakes with nut butter, a yoghurt pot, a couple of squares of dark chocolate, a slice of fat-free Molly Cake that you could bake at the weekend (see Waitrose.com for the recipe), or oatcakes with soft cheese, tomato and cucumber on top are good choices.”
An edited version of this feature appeared in Waitrose Weekend in April 2020 (c) Waitrose