Dame Prue Leith might be in her mid-80s, but she exudes health and wellbeing (she even has a new book out called Being Old And Learning To Love It). So what’s her secret? Speaking to Good Housekeeping, she revealed exactly how she looks after her health – from the staple she eats when she’s feeling under the weather, to her favourite comfort food and her daily exercise routine.
‘At the moment, I’m just recovering from a cold,’ she says. ‘I was really feeling lousy, run down and full of cold. John [Prue’s husband] asked what I’d like for supper and I had yogurt, granola and grapes. I do love yogurt. If I’m feeling low, I’ll just eat yogurt.
‘My favourite comfort food, though, if I’m really tired or if I’m in a hurry, is scrambled eggs, often with some prosciutto – either fried in a pan or in the air fryer. It goes wonderfully crisp.’
Prue says she’s conscious of ‘what’s healthy and what’s not’, adding: ‘I never buy ready-meals and I love cooking, so I cook from scratch. We grow a lot of our own veg and we go to a very good farmer’s market. So I know that we eat well, but I never think about it – and I wonder if that’s the secret. In doing that, you still keep the joy around food; eating healthily never feels like a punishment. I don’t always get my five a day – but sometimes, I’ll have 20 a day. I just think food should be a joy.’
In January, Dame Prue announced she was stepping down from her role as judge on The Great British Bake Off ‘after dithering for two years’. ‘Of course, I do know what I’ll be missing,’ she wrote in The Times. ‘The dithering was because there cannot be a better job in the world. I know I’d enjoy it if I stayed… But I do want to reorganise my life a bit. Ideally, I’d like to work in winter and play in summer.’
And even though she confesses she finds exercise ‘boring’, she has a set routine that she does every day. ‘I had a physiotherapist, who told me that I absolutely had to do a bunch of exercises and she gave me 30 stretches and leg lifts to do,’ she says. ‘She said they should take 45 minutes because you have to do them very slowly, but I find it so boring. I go at it like a steam train. I do a whole lot in 10 minutes!’
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