The Ultimate Body Plan: 75 easy recipes plus workouts for a leaner, fitter you

I started going to the gym when I was 20, but had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I’d run on the treadmill for half an hour every day and do some dumbbell curls and that was it. I’d also read somewhere that cutting out carbs was the thing to do, so I did that… and was always totally knackered. My skin turned grey, my hair stopped growing properly and I looked awful. I didn’t have a clue about training or nutrition, wasn’t getting the energy or nutrients I needed, and was just flogging my body on this treadmill. I lost a lot of weight quickly due to crash dieting and endless cardio and, as is often the case when that happens, my boobs were the first things to go.

I’d always had big boobs – they run in the family – but I was soon saying to my mum, ‘Look at my boobs, they look so saggy, they’re awful,’ as I could actually pick up the skin where they’d deflated, like balloons. During photoshoots I would have to wear push-up bras because I didn’t feel comfortable in a bikini any more. I became really self-conscious. I just didn’t look like me any more.

I told my mum I wanted a boob job. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she cried. ‘If you think they’re saggy now, wait until you have two kids like I have!’ She joked about it, but soon realised how serious I was and how down I felt. We’d go shopping and I’d stand miserably in the changing room because clothes didn’t hang right or like I wanted them to. She eventually agreed to come with me to meet a doctor at Transform, the plastic surgery clinic. He explained the process and showed me photos – I think Mum was secretly hoping that would put me off, but it didn’t at all. I was determined… and so I did it. Just before my 22nd birthday I got my old boobs back(!) and moved to Mum’s while I recovered from the surgery.

It was part of my career to do photoshoots in a bikini – that was a big part of how I made my living. I couldn’t cover up and I didn’t want to feel crappy about it. So I didn’t – and still don’t – regret having them done for a moment. I immediately felt like the old me again. I didn’t do it for anyone else, I did it for me. To make me feel good, because my body had changed shape and I wanted to feel confident again.

When I was 22, I met Premier League footballer Marcus Bent and we started dating. It was my first ‘high-profile’ relationship. I was naïve about what that meant at the time and so was totally unprepared for the press interest. During the time I was working with the lads’ mags, I tried to remain as unaffected by the press coverage and constant analysis of my life and looks as possible. When I hadn’t been living in the heart of the tabloid loop, it was easy-ish… but that all changed when I met Marcus. There were articles guessing how long it would last, wondering whether we were going to move in together, get engaged or have a baby. We’d be snapped when we were out and people would comment on what I was wearing or whether there was something wrong if we weren’t together.

We got engaged in 2008, a few months after I got back from filming I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, but split later that year, just before my 24th birthday in November. I found it incredibly tough, even though it was my decision. Marcus was extremely kind and caring, but something just wasn’t sitting right. Yes, I could have stayed in an okay relationship and had no financial worries due to his profession, but I’d grafted my whole life to get where I was (moving out to live on my own at 17), so I had my own money and besides, that’s never been a driving factor for me in a relationship. I wanted the little things money can’t buy – glances across a crowded room and loving Post-it notes left on a mirror. I remember Mum saying, ‘Gem, do you see yourself with this person forever?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know’, and she said, ‘Well, you categorically cannot marry him then because with the right man, you wouldn’t think twice about answering yes to that question.’ That was it, I knew I had to end it.

I was devastated. It can be as hard to break up with someone as it is to be broken up with, especially when that person has done nothing wrong. You’ve got this overwhelming sense of guilt and then the worry over whether you’ve done the right thing. I’d wake up in the morning and for a split second feel fine… then I’d remember what’d happened and feel physically sick. I was walking hunched over because if I stood upright my stomach would hurt. I couldn’t eat much and so lost even more weight. Then the weirdest thing happened. People started telling me how great I looked! My eyes were hollow, I was shaky and anxious, my skin was grey and my hair was lank, yet just because I was skinny, people said, ‘Oh God, you look fab! What’s your secret?’ I wanted to reply, ‘Heartbreak and misery, pal’, but of course I didn’t. I said, ‘Thank you’, while thinking, ‘Do you really think I look good? Because I feel like absolute crap. What does that say about what you think looks good?’

I was dealing with all of that, plus the split was being played out all over the media. It was surreal. Especially when every article focused on what I must have done wrong – that there must have been something wrong with me. It all added to my stress, anxiety and self-doubt.

I was filming the live-action segment for the game Command & Conquer around this time and you could see my ribs in pictures. There’s a promotional image of me in the uniform and my hands dwarf my waist, my legs look like drainpipes and my cheekbones are nearly cutting my skin. The thing is, it is a glamorous photo – I’m all made up and posing like a professional. You could look at it and think, ‘She looks nice,’ but because I know how I felt when it was taken, I see it now and think, ‘I never want to look like that again’.

At the time I said to Mum, ‘God, if I feel like this every day, life’s going to be horrific’. She said, ‘Oh Gemma, I’ve got news for you. This won’t be the last time you go through heartbreak, but it also won’t be the last time you get over it. You will get through it. And then you’ll get heartbroken again and get through it again.’ It’s totally true, but when you’re in that state yourself, you can’t see it or hear it. You think it’s the end of the world – that you’re going to end up an old spinster living alone with ten dogs.

While everyone was being so complimentary about how great I looked all I could think was, ‘Hang on, if I look great now, didn’t I look good before?’ and the insecurity cycle cranked up again. That’s when it struck me, how twisted it all was – that the only reason I looked supposedly ‘great’ was because I wasn’t eating or sleeping and felt horrendous. How is that something to aspire to?

It dawned on me that I’d rather feel good than look a certain way. I could try to get over the break-up, sort myself out, and yes, be a bit heavier, but be happier and healthier. I thought, ‘Sack what I look like – I just need to feel happy again’, because yes, people can look a certain way, but you have no idea what they’re going through below the surface. It’s like, ‘Your insides are rotting, but you look great! Heartbreak’s the secret! Just get shat on and you’ll look lovely!’

With my mum Sandra and stepdad Peter. Holidays with them are still so much fun.

Heartbreak is something most people have gone through or will go through. My mum and dad divorced when I was ten and my mum has told me since that it was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. She said, ‘I would have left sooner but you were so young. I couldn’t do that to you.’ But I said, ‘What about yourself, Mum? Why would you stay with Dad if you weren’t compatible any more?’ She said, ‘When you have kids yourself you’ll understand.’ And some of my friends have stayed with men that weren’t right for them and I’ve thought, ‘But you’re miserable and wanting to kiss other lads at the weekend when you’re drunk because you’re so unhappy. How can that be better than leaving? Isn’t it better for kids not to live with two sad parents?’

Bottom line is: we have no idea what anyone’s going through or dealing with. People could look at pictures of me at the time and think I was on top of the world. Work was going well, I looked ‘great’, I was young, single and free. Supposedly. When actually I was incredibly unhappy.

When things weren’t getting any better, my sister Nina sat me down and said, ‘You lost Dad five years ago and you dealt with that – and that’s the hardest thing any young girl can deal with. So who the hell is an ex-boyfriend in comparison to Dad?’ I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s right! If I can get through losing Dad – a man who loved me unconditionally and who I assumed would always be around – I can get through losing a guy I’ve spent two or three years with.’ It made me realise that I was stronger than I knew. That although I might think, ‘I can’t cope with this’, I can. I’ve got through 34 years of both my best and my worst days and I’m still standing.

I had to channel those thoughts again when things kicked off in the press in exactly the same way after I called off my engagement to Liam Richards in 2013. Actually, that time was worse because they now had two ‘failed engagements’ to pin on me. Liam and I were together for three and a bit years, but split because we were both working so hard we rarely saw each other during the last year. The headlines screamed: ‘She has the career, she has this and that, but she can’t find love!’ Or ‘What’s wrong with Gemma? Why can’t she hold on to a man?’ All the time I was thinking, ‘But I ended it! Maybe I didn’t want to settle for something that wasn’t right?’ Mum said, ‘You’re getting stressed about something you have no control over. Will them saying this about you matter in five years? No. So why waste five minutes on it then?’ That five years-five minutes rule is one I’ve carried with me throughout my life.

Working things out

I still assumed that to be fit the aim was to see numbers drop off the scales. That if I exercised like a demon, I’d look as slim as I did when I was heartbroken, but actually feel great too, rather than wanting to crawl into a hole and cry. But lo-and-behold that didn’t happen. No matter how many miles I sweated away on the treadmill or half-hearted dumbbell curls I did, I was still a 5ft 9in woman with muscly legs and broad shoulders. Who’d have thought it, huh? The saddest thing was that I hated my body for it. I was still convinced that to look good, and to look fit, I needed to be smaller – somehow less than I was now. It never occurred to me not to want to get smaller.

Everything changed for me when I started exercising with personal trainer Olly Foster in 2014 at the Ultimate Performance gym in Mayfair when I was working in London. Olly said to me, ‘If you could look like anyone, who would it be?’ and I said right away, ‘Kylie Minogue. She’s tiny and petite. She looks great.’ He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You are NEVER going to look like Kylie Minogue. NEVER. You probably looked like Kylie Minogue when you were 12 years old. Let’s be realistic.’ My jaw dropped. How could he say that?! I was incredibly offended. It was this man’s job to make me look like Kylie Minogue.

But then I looked around that gym – at all the women weight-lifting and loving it – and realised they weren’t using their bodies to look a specific way, they were using them to improve their health, posture, stamina and mental outlook. To improve everything. They were putting looks aside and prioritising how they felt. All different shapes and sizes, all mucking in, grunting and sweating and looking like total badasses! Then it hit me: of course I’m never going to look like Kylie Minogue. It’s ridiculous! And nor should I want to, because I’m simply not built that way.

‘Oh my God…,’ I said, and sat down, kind of stunned, as Olly started working out a programme for me. It’s like someone telling you, ‘The entire way you see yourself is messed up’ and realising they’re right. Olly said, ‘You’ve got really strong legs, maybe we could up the weight and you could use them more’, and again I was speechless. Instead of saying, ‘Let’s try to slim down your thighs’, he wanted me to make them more muscly?! Hell yes he did. He understood that my ‘thunder thighs’ could be a good thing. A great thing even. That my body could work in my favour. That instead of trying to be incredibly thin, having drainpipe legs and a pancake bum, I could have strong legs that would carry me further and faster, below a curvy bum. I realised that before now, I’d not only not been using my body to its best advantage, I’d been actively working against it, punishing it for looking the way it did, trying to bully it into being smaller, weighing less, being less. While all the time, all these women in the gym were doing the total opposite.

Think about that for a moment: think about how much you punish your body – treating it badly, hating on it – for not looking like something or someone else. You will look your absolute best – not my best or Kylie’s best – when you accept what you cannot change and start working with your body, not against it. I learned an incredibly important lesson that day – I shouldn’t want to get fit to look a certain way, but to feel a certain way. Looking good means nothing if you don’t feel good.

Good things come to women who weight(lift)

Repeat after me: ‘weight training will not make me look like a man!’ You won’t become ‘too big’ by lifting weights. Women have nowhere near the amount of testosterone they’d need to ‘bulk up’ to the point that they look masculine. All weight training will do is make you leaner and fitter so you’ll still look and feel like a woman, but a warrior woman who can carry all her own bags, thanks very much.

Here are just a few of the benefits of resistance training for women:

1) It burns more fat. Yes, it’s true that while you’re actually performing the exercise you’re burning fewer calories weight-lifting than you would doing two hours on the cross-trainer (no, thank you). However, you’re actually increasing your metabolic rate, which means you’ll be burning more calories for longer afterwards.

2) You can eat more. Your muscles will get denser and bigger, so you’ll need to eat more to maintain them. Or, looking at it the other way, you can handle a lot more calories. Result.

3) You’ll get stronger bones. The pressure weight training puts on your bones encourages your body to invest in making them stronger and sturdier. This counteracts the natural propensity for women’s bone density to decrease from their 30s onwards.

4) Your immune system will thank you. People who lift tend to have better eating habits and better quality of sleep, lower stress levels and improved circulation, all of which makes you healthier, period.

5) You’ll feel like a combination of Xena, Jet and She-Ra.

Please remember that the photos you see of me working out in the gym are taken when my muscles are swollen with blood to help me lift the weights. That’s why people look pumped during workouts: their muscles are literally ‘pumped up’. Bodybuilders and fitness models go out of their way to look bigger and more defined on shoots or at shows, enhancing their muscles (and even making their veins ‘pop’) through a careful diet, dehydration and fake tan. People can see those images and think, ‘I’ll look like that all the time if I do weights, even just at the shops!’ You absolutely won’t. You’ll just look toned. Lifting weights won’t make you ‘butch’ or ‘manly’; it’ll make you more confident, energetic, stronger, leaner, fitter and happier.

Struggling, sweating and swearing

I started training with Olly properly in 2014 and, because I was now training with direction, the changes I went through – both physical and mental – were pretty much immediate. It’s not just the natural high that comes from exercising, but eating right also has a huge impact on your mood and body and therefore behaviour. Once you start something good, your body craves it and you feel better for having taken action. I had not only found one of the best personal trainers around, but a great boyfriend too! Olly and I were together for around two years and I’m happy to say we’re still mates to this day.

I started posting videos and pictures of my workouts on Instagram and saw how I was able to connect with people in a positive way. Lots of people were into the fact that I was working out to feel good first, and look good second. For that reason I’ve made it my mission to always be open and honest, both about how I feel and how I look.

Then the trolls arrived. The keyboard warriors who spend all day sitting alone in their parents’ basement venting about others because they’ve got nothing else going on. Lads message me and say, ‘You’ve gone too far, you look like a man’ and I’ll reply and say, ‘Well, lift heavier and maybe you will too!’ Yes, that kind of stuff makes me angry, but I’ll take a moment and choose to react differently – I actually try to take those comments as compliments now. I mean, at the end of the day, they’re still looking, aren’t they? If they weren’t interested, jealous or annoyed they wouldn’t be doing it. No one else’s opinion should have the power to make you happy or not. You can’t control other people’s actions, but you can control how you react to them. You can either wallow or brush it off.

My plan from the start has always been to just be me. We all look different, we all have crap days and we all slip up: welcome to the club – there’s seven billion of us in it. I want to show that if I can do this, you can too. Commit to looking after yourself, get to know your own body, take social media with a pinch of salt, be honest about your intentions, ignore the naysayers and people who don’t want to support you, and cut yourself some goddamn slack.

Evil Steve

The Ultimate Body Plan

While my training now had more focus and my aims had changed (no more Kylie hang-ups!), when the summer of 2017 rolled around, I knew I wanted to give myself a new challenge. Olly and I had split up totally amicably in 2016 and I was training back home at the Manchester branch of Ultimate Performance. I was still hosting my radio show, but had just left Emmerdale where I’d played Carly Hope for around two years. I absolutely loved the job and the people there, but wanted to change things up. But while I was still hitting the gym, I’d got into a bit of a training rut. So I signed up to the gym’s 12-week training plan that promised to transform both your body and your mindset, and started working with personal trainer, Steve Chambers. He soon became known as Evil Steve!

I didn’t have a holiday booked or want to get in shape for a specific event, I just wanted to challenge myself. I was seriously curious to see what my body and mind were capable of. Plus, I respond well to stricter routines. It’s when you’re left to your own devices that you half-heartedly do some weights before heading home and eating three bags of crisps.

This plan is 100% focused on feeling great rather than on vanity. You’re far more likely to stick with something if you’re doing it for sustainable long-term results (to feel great) than to hit a certain number on the scales (like some faddy diets promise) because, if you don’t reach that goal you’ll feel like crap. More often than not, even if you do reach it you still feel rubbish because you’re not dealing with the cause of your feelings, both mental and physical – bad diet, poor sleep, stress, low self-esteem, lack of energy etc. You’re just dealing with what you think is a symptom (weight). You’ll then keep punishing your body because you won’t know how to feel better, constantly moving the goalposts: ‘I’m now a size 8, but I still feel exhausted, run-down, stressed and unhappy. Maybe I’ll feel better at a size 6.’ No, you won’t. This plan offers a total lifestyle overhaul with no unrealistic expectations to falter under. In feeling stronger and more positive, you’ll be in the best position to take on everything – with looking great a happy side effect.

The plan meant I had to start cooking and prepping meals in advance, which you will too. People can feel daunted by this, but you can make time for it. If you’re serious about change, you’ll get up 15 minutes earlier to make your breakfast, or put aside a couple of hours on a Sunday to prep your food for the next few days like I do. Once you get into the routine of it, it becomes second nature. Also, I find it extremely motivating to remember that I’m eating to fuel my muscles, to feel great for the rest of the day. Cutting out rubbish that makes you feel sluggish isn’t a chore when you can really feel the results.

So, on day one of the plan, I put my leggings and crop top on and looked in the mirror. I took the top photo opposite (taking progress photos is part of the programme; see here (#litres_trial_promo)) and thought, ‘Right, this is how you look now. You’ve had 32 years on these feet, these legs, looking how you do, feeling how you do. Now it’s just 12 weeks to see where it can go and what you can do!’ I really psyched myself up for it, getting into the mindset of an athlete before a fight.

The transformation

The first week of the 12-week programme was horrendous. Horrific. The worst. I felt sick, I was shaking and dripping with sweat. ‘God, I can’t do this,’ I thought. ‘I want to quit. I want to die.’

But I didn’t quit. I didn’t die.

What I did do was lose fat, which proved I’d had it to lose in the first place. My body was responding immediately to working out, and after 3 weeks I’d lost 1.5% of my body fat. But it was actually more the mental changes that struck me first. I started feeling proud of myself – knowing I’d sweated, had had a good session and burned loads of calories. Something changed in my body language – my shoulders went down and my chin up and I even walked with more confidence. Plus, I started sleeping better. I already found myself waking up, checking my phone and seeing it was ten minutes before my alarm was due to go off. I wasn’t waking feeling sluggish, exhausted or bloated as I’d had a good meal the night before.

Three weeks in, I noticed more definition in my arms. When I sat down my stomach and thighs stayed tight. My entire body was getting leaner and I felt much more energetic. Friends and family also started seeing changes, which is always a huge motivator.

Depending on your fitness levels to start with, your results at this stage will probably be even more dramatic than mine were. If you stick to the plan 100% it’ll be a shock to the system and you’ll shed weight and body fat. However, be warned – you may still be craving the sweet stuff. They say it takes between two to three weeks to cleanse your palette. Keep going! Push through. Your body is essentially detoxing so your skin may actually break out as it gets rid of all the toxins – but then, once they’re out and if you keep at it, at around this point your skin will really start to glow!