Weigh to go

PRESENTER Kate Garraway’s recent absence from the GMTV sofa turned out to be very good timing. Being away filming a new ITV1 daytime series coincided with reports that her husband, former Labour lobbyist Derek Draper, was involved with a smear campaign originated by an advisor in the Prime Minister’s office.

She might have found it embarrassing having to deal with reports about her husband’s alleged involvement in the headline- making political scandal.

Garraway herself is no stranger to making the news. Last year, she posed provocatively pretending to breastfeed a calf with the images used to promote a documentary on women who breastfeed other people’s babies.

She’s now expecting her second child – daughter Darcey is three – so that as contestants on her new show The Biggest Loser got smaller, presenter Kate got bigger.

Now six months pregnant, she says: “At least I wasn’t standing there looking stick thin and irritating. I was green and nauseous.”

She spent eight weeks following the progress of 16 seriously overweight contestants competing for The Biggest Loser crown by ditching takeaways on the couch for cookery lessons and physical challenges.

The show, which originated in the US, includes activities such as running with hay bales, pumping handcarts along an old steam railway and tobogganing down snow slopes.

The gruelling weight loss programme included five hours of exercise a day under the watchful eye of fitness trainers Angie Dowds and Richard Callender.

The volunteers lived together in a house in Leicestershire. The rules included no alcohol, cigarettes or food not supplied by the approved nutritionist.

Books and music were their only entertainment.

There were no newspapers or TV, no contact with the outside world.

At the end of eight weeks, the remaining contestants will be weighed and finalists chosen. These people will be sent home to continue training, before returning two months later for a final weigh-in.

Garraway says the stories of two of the women, Michelle and Eunice, touched her the most.

“They were there because their obesity was preventing them from conceiving. It was inspiring for me to see them going through all that, just to have the chance of having a child. I realised how lucky I am,” she says.

The idea behind The Biggest Loser is to break the contestants’ cycles of obesity for good. This isn’t one of those boot camps or quick fix shows where “they spend a fortune having things sucked out and trimmed”, as she puts it.

“Here, people are working incredibly hard to change their lives, sometimes to save their lives. But no one waves a magic wand or sweeps in and makes it happen for them.”

The show does give them the chance to win £10,000 in cash, but she insists they soon forgot about the money and stopped making excuses for their weight.

“When they started, they all said there were things they would and wouldn’t do.

But to stay in the show they had to fight for it. They realised it was okay to have dreams like that, and to want something,”

she says.

Garraway admits she had reservations when first approached to present the show. “I spend a lot of time on TV talking about unhealthy weight loss and eating disorders. But the show proves that obesity can be tackled through exercise and healthy eating. You’ll see it happen before your eyes, every day,” she says.

“Someone once said that being overweight is the most physical way of wearing pain. With any kind of extreme obesity, someone who is six or seven stones overweight, and putting a lot of strain on their body, you don’t get to that point without something having gone wrong.”

Describing herself as “not naturally super skinny”, she admits that she’s fairly typical when it comes to managing her weight. She has to watch what she eats.

“Everyone thinks they’ve got half a stone to lose, and so do I. But I once had an overactive thyroid and got really skinny, which was quite scary. That taught me that there is such a thing as too thin, as well as too big.”

■ The Biggest Losers is on ITV1, Monday to Friday, 4pm.