‘So fat I couldn’t walk up the stairs’

DEBBIE Rush was determined that her Coronation Street role of Anna Windass wasn’t going to play a part in her Bulge Buster DVD which saw her become the talk of the cobbles by dropping four dress sizes in four-and-a-half months.

“She’s just a frumpy housewife.

I’m real. Everybody has been really lovely and supportive and when I went to do it in the first place I had to get permission because my shape changed so much, but if you watch Corrie you’ll notice, even up to the live show, that though Anna has changed dramatically in size she’s still the same and wearing big baggy clothes. There’s no glamour involved.

When I went to see the show’s producers I told them ‘I feel unhealthy and unhappy with a lot of things when I’m climbing the stairs at night I’m out of breath. It’s ruddy ridiculous’. The word came back that Anna Windass wasn’t defined by her weight so they’ve been really supportive and I’ve had lots of great comments from work,” says Rush who went from a size 16 to a size eight.

“I managed it with sheer hard work and I’ve said to people that I only had a day off every week to do it. I’d put the weight on going to things like charity dos and I decided to do something about it. I thought of it as being a job because I was so determined. And it was tough at first but I wanted to get the message out that it is hard but you don’t have to deprive yourself. If I can do it then anybody can,” says Rush, who is very modest about her success as an actress.

“I came into this job late. I started training in my Thirties and I got my first job in my late Thirties and Corrie when I was 42. So I’m just normal and you just get on with it... and there’s no bloody money for gastric bands. I wanted to make this DVD for real women. Some people have said ‘oh it’s all right for her, she had a personal trainer’. Well if you get the DVD you can have your own personal trainer for however much the DVD costs. Women are telling me that it’s inspired them and how honest I am on the recording.

“I couldn’t walk up the stairs after the first training session, but this time it was because my bum and legs were hurting. Then, the second time it’s easier and after the first month I was hooked on exercise,” says the mother-of-three, now aged 16, 19 and 20, who didn’t start putting on weight until later in life.

“When I had my babies in my Twenties I didn’t retain any baby weight. At 35 everything changed.

Then I recalled how an Auntie once told me ‘you’ll pay for that later’ when I put more cream on a trifle and I thought ‘will I ‘eck’. But on Corrie I was working a lot of hours and it was hard and I wasn’t cooking like I did when the kids were little.

Eating then became a bad habit when I’d go for a sugar rush to get back some energy and go for chocolate, sweets and rubbish,” she admits.

“I think the weight came off so easily and quickly is because I was totally disciplined and went back to the way you are supposed to eat. I never thought in a million years I could get down to a size eight because I’d always been a size ten. I did not, hand on heart, expect that to happen. I finished the project about a month ago and I then lost another two pounds and actually had to adjust my eating upwards,” Rush adds.

She is adamant that it wasn’t about the diet and exercise being “a boring life” and it was more about swapping from drinking lager and wine to things like a vodka and slimline tonic.

“I’ve had friends who have lost a couple of stone and then put it back on. People seem to yo-yo but I went along with people who were keen on me losing weight the old-fashioned way. It’s about doing more and eating less and now I’ve realised that this is a total way of life and I don’t want to go back. I know that my husband, like most men, would find a woman sexy in a binbag. They like women with meat on their bones so I think this is more about women’s self-esteem. But the only person that can change your appearance is you.

I wanted to feel good about myself so that’s why I did it,” she adds.

I ask if she’s happy about the surname of Windass for her family and the puns it’s inspired.

“People will remember us won’t they? The Battersbys were the same because it seemed to sound like they would batter you, so maybe we’ve got a lot of wind up us,” Rush jokes and adds, more seriously, that she feels lucky to be in work.

“I don’t know whether I’ll be there forever because at the end of the day I’m a jobbing actor. So I’m under no illusion that I’ll be there for the next 30 years,” she says and adds that Debbie Rush would never have married a man like her screen husband Eddie “but I love Steve Huiston to bits and that’s my answer”.

■ Debbie Rush’s three children, Tom, Poppy and William are all involved in the Manchester band The Sticks with Williams also appearing in BBC1’s Waterloo Road and Poppy starting to break into acting as well. Debbie admits she didn’t want her children to go into the profession much as her own father had been against her acting. “I kind of gave in when they were at senior school because I took my own advice of ‘don’t talk about it...

do it’. I’m so proud of them.”

■ Debbie’s Bulge Buster Workout (Universal Pictures, £19.99) is out this week.