TV personality Gillian McKeith tells Sunita Rappai why healthy living doesn’t have to be hard on the palate

YOU are what you eat, according to South End Green-based author and food guru, Gillian McKeith – not a pleasant thought for anyone whose diet revolves around burgers and chips.
Her latest book, You Are What You Eat Cookbook, an accompaniment to the phenomenally successful television series of the same name, is already riding high in the bestseller lists – and the Ms McKeith phenomenon shows no sign of slowing down.
The Scottish-born author and presenter is director of her own clinic in central London where her aim, she says, is to “shatter the usual expectations of dieting and allow you to eat more, not less”.
“The recipes in this book are ones I’ve used for years,” she says. “If you follow them, you can achieve enormous levels of health. People don’t realise that food can be medicine. It can really change you.”
Ms McKeith’s first book, You Are What You Eat, a big seller last year, laid out the basics of her food philosophy. Her number one rule, she says, is to “eat as much food as you want, until you are satisfied, as long as you eat the right foods in the right way”.
Her food philosophy is based on macrobiotic principles stressing a simple, whole food diet, which she absorbed after an almost Damascene conversion to the cause inspired by an ex-boyfriend.
She says: “I was living in America at the time eating mostly frozen foods, nothing fresh. I rarely ate fruit and veggies and I was horrendously ill. I had a migraine that just would not lift and I was on a merry-go-round of visiting doctors.
“My boyfriend took me on a trip to a macrobiotic seminar because he wanted to help me. I had no interest in any of it at the time and I was just so closed. But that was a turning point. I knew I had to change my life. I knew I had a message.”
While she followed a strict macrobiotic diet for seven years – “you’ve got to do it all or nothing so I was eating a lot of grains, seeds, beans, nuts and seaweeds” – she eventually started craving “real foods”. So now, while there are recipes in the book that follow classic macrobiotic principles, there are many others that would sit comfortably on a restaurant menu.
Breakfast suggestions, for example, include miso barley soup and five different types of porridge – from buckwheat, lemon and ginger to cinnamon millet – to a frittata (a type of Spanish omelette) served with cherry tomatoes and baby spinach.
Elsewhere, smoked tofu and bean burgers sit alongside chicken burgers while mung bean casseroles and tofu pecan stir fries are offered alongside vegetable sushi rolls and aromatic poached chicken.
If there might seem to be a lack of cohesion in the principles laid out in the book, Ms McKeith is unapologetic.
“Now I incorporate the principles of macrobiotics. It’s the Gillian Ms McKeith method of eating,” she says.
“This is a labour of love. I want people to feel as good as I do.”

• Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat Cookbook is published by Penguin priced £14.99.