Gregg Wallace has opened up about his past issues with alcohol, revealing he would start drinking from 10am in his local pub, seven days a week.
The MasterChef star says his “drink dependency” came to a head in 2005 as he divorced his second wife Denise.
The 56-year-old said his drinking got so bad that the owner of his local pub at the time would let him in while he was “still wearing his dressing gown.”
“I just wanted to be out and I just wanted to drink. It was seven days a week,” Gregg told MailOnline.
“It got so bad at one point the owner of The White Bear in Clerkenwell used to let me in when he was still in his dressing gown.
“I’d be in there with the window cleaner, who was also a drunk, and a drunken lawyer and we’d start drinking at 10am – then the landlord would open up and we’d just catch up and tell him what we had.”
He added: “I don’t think the people out there boozing all the time are in a good mental state – I definitely wasn’t. It means you don’t want to go home.
“I’d start at 10 in the morning then have a big lunch with a few more drinks, have a couple in the afternoon followed by a big dinner.
“At the weekends, I used to call my sofa the Betty Ford Clinic. It was drink dependency, I just didn’t realise. It all seemed like fun.
“It might have also been loneliness and a desire to just party and go out all the time. The idea of being at home wasn’t great.”
The TV star credits his wife Anne-Marie Sterpini for changing his approach to drinking.
“Anna made an enormous difference. She said to me ‘I’m just asking, not nagging you, but do you know when you’re going to stop when drinking?’ I was like, ‘No, am I supposed to?’
“She taught me the second drink is normally when you feel the most euphoria and if you carry on drinking from there, you don’t prolong the feeling, you go somewhere else. That’s what I learned.”
Gregg has since shed four stone after getting into fitness after doctors warned him that if he didn’t do something about his weight, he was a candidate for a heart attack.
He was also inspired to get fit so he could see his son, Sid, 16 months, grow up.
“Having my baby boy made me want to be fit and strong. I can now go for long walks, which I wouldn’t have been able to do before,” he told Closer magazine.
He also pointed to the two-decade age difference between him and his wife as another motivating factor to get into shape.
“Anne being younger than me was even more of an inspiration to be fit – you can have an old husband but she didn’t have to have a fat, old husband,” Gregg revealed.
- If you need help with a drinking problem, call the Alcoholics Anonymous national helpline for free on 0800 9177 650 or email help@aamail.org.
- For advice on how to reduce drinking, visit Drinkaware’s website or Alcohol Change UK.
- Find alcohol addiction services near you using this NHS tool.