BBC's Carol Kirkwood admits she only spends 90 minutes a day with new husband

At the start of the year,Carol Kirkwood was hit by a “terrible” bout of food poisoning, which triggered a lifestyle transformation that changed not just her eating habits, but her entire outlook.

“Afterwards, I just ate two slices of toast for two days and I wasn’t hungry. I’m a snacker. I love chocolate, a glass of wine, crisps, and I thought, ‘Right, you don’t need all this food.’ Now I eat when I’m hungry rather than just eating because I can.”

While she refuses to divulge exactly how much weight she’s lost (“my weight is a state secret”) Carol admits in an exclusive chat with OK! that she’s now “probably a dress size-and-a-half” smaller and fitting comfortably into a size 10, and sometimes even an eight. "I’ve got lots of clothes from years of doing telly. When I couldn’t get into them, I put them away. Now I can. It feels like I’ve got a whole new wardrobe, but I don’t. It’s old clothes that I’m wearing again.” It comes after Sharon Osbourne breaks down in tears at Ozzy's funeral in heartbreaking scenes.

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The BBC weather presenter and author’s fresh approach to health isn’t about restriction but balance. “I’ve done every single diet going but now I’m not depriving myself of anything. If I want a piece of chocolate, I’ll have it, but then I actually don’t. It’s like somebody’s flipped a switch in my head.”

Her daily routine starts eye-wateringly early at 2.45 am. “About 9.30am, if I’m a bit peckish, I’ll have an apple or a banana, then, after my shift, I get home and eat whatever the dickens I want, perhaps a toasted pitta with rocket, tomatoes, sweetcorn, peppers and chicken. In the evening, I might have another pitta with hummus, or some peppers with hummus and, because I’m eating this way, I’m not hungry between meals any more.”

In an age where weight-loss injections are becoming a go-to quick fix, some have wrongly assumed that Carol must also be using them. “I have had a couple of emails saying, ‘It’s obvious you’re doing this.’ Each to their own. If somebody wants to do that, I’m not going to judge them — it’s their bodies, their life — but I’m glad I’m doing it this way,” she insists.

Brimming with positive energy, Carol, 63, credits her sunny outlook to a “happy upbringing” in the Highland village of Morar, raised by her “upbeat” hotelier parents Callum and Nancy. And she is especially upbeat when we speak one day after the end of her summer break to Cornwall with her police officer husband, Steve Randall, 51. While away, the couple got back to basics by taking a tech detox.

“Like everyone else, I live by my phone and it’s been so busy recently that it was a case of, ‘Let’s reconnect, switch off the outside world and enjoy some quiet time,’” explains Carol, before confessing that she didn’t exactly play by the rules. “It’s really hard. One time I did secretly switch it on when Steve had gone to bed,” she chuckles. “Just a quick check to see what was happening!”

Holiday over, Carol is now back in full professional mode. After our 10am chat, she’s catching a train to Manchester to be at BBC Breakfast ’s Salford Quays studio at 4am before heading back south to promote her fifth novel, Meet Me At Sunset .

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In her glass-half-full style, she says her busy career, combined with Steve’s antisocial working hours at the Metropolitan Police, is keeping them in the honeymoon zone. “We don’t see a lot of each other during the week. We worked out that Monday to Thursday we only see each other for an hour-and-a-half a day, so we treasure the time that we have together. It’s really precious.”

Joking that “it’ll be a real shock” when she and Steve finally enjoy limitless time together in later life, Carol quashes speculation about imminent retirement. “Well, I’m 63 and I’m not going to be still doing this when I’m 73, butI’ve got no plans to retire just yetso it won’t be for a while,” she insists.

Since joining BBC Breakfast in April 1998 after stints on BBC Radio, The Weather Channel and HTV West, Carol has seen many Breakfast faces come and go. However, some remain unforgettable, including co-presenter and friend Bill Turnbull, who died in August 2022 at the age of 66, just four years after a prostate cancer diagnosis.

“He pops up in my photo memories regularly and I think, ‘Oh, Billy!’ I will always miss him and look back fondly on the memories and times that we had together on Breakfast ,” smiles Carol. “He used to make me laugh so much. He was quite proper but very naughty as well, and I love that combination.”

Carol’s blossoming relationship with Steve was of “real interest” to Bill. “He was like, ‘How’s it going? What’s the latest? Any rings on the horizon?’ I’d be like, ‘Billy, no. Not yet. It’s too soon!’”

Carol met Steve at a work function in 2021 and they became friends before finding love. She announced their engagement live from the Chelsea Flower Show in 2022, eventually tying the knot in December 2023, 15 years after the end of her 25-year marriage to businessman Jimmy Kirkwood.

Surviving heartbreak, she says, has made her a better writer – and person. "You know how it feels when somebody doesn’t love you any more and moves on, in the same way that you’ve probably done to somebody else, when you’ve been honest and said, ‘I think you’re great, but romantically, it’s not going anywhere,’” she says.

“When you’re heartbroken, you cry a lot, you feel sorry for yourself and you think, perhaps, you’re going to spend the rest of your life on your own, and then you don’t. You come out of that. You grow.”

Now, she hopes that her own happy ending is giving hope to other women who find themselves suddenly navigating midlife solo. “When I got divorced, I did date other people, then somebody said to me, ‘You need to find yourself’ and I was thinking, ‘What? I know myself. I know who I am.’ But I went for a period without dating people, because I was just happy going out with my friends.

“I used to go travelling a lot with my friend, Sue, when we were both single girls. She’d just got divorced as well. We would jump in the car, cross the channel, stay in a cheap hotel, wander around the beach. One night we went out for dinner during a music festival. We thought we were living the dream. You just find a different life, and it’s a good life, too.”

Another heartbreak that Carol has made peace with is not having children. “I always wanted to have children. That was my dream,” she says, explaining that she explored fertility treatment until the cost became too great. “It was a source of heartbreak, but we tried and failed.”

Carol is one of eight siblings, has 15 nieces and nephews, plus godchildren, and relishes her role as an auntie. She smiles, “I love them all incredibly.” So with her love life looking good, another novel already in motion and a decade since she finished in 10th place alongside Pasha Kovalev in the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing , are any other high-profile TV shows tempting her?

“I would love to doRace Across The World,” replies Carol without hesitation. “When I say this to some of my friends, they say, ‘But would you want to go on an overnight bus for 18 hours across India?’ Not as my main holiday, but as an adventure? Absolutely!”

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