Woman's Hour - Cook the Perfect... with Tom Kerridge, LGBTQ adoption, boys and eating disorders

Episode Date: February 27, 2019

Tom Kerridge's new book Fresh Start features recipes for home cooks who want to stop eating ready meals and takeaways and start cooking from scratch using fresh ingredients. He joins Jenni in the studio to Cook the Perfect…Roasted Winter Sprout Curry.The number of boys receiving treatment for eating disorders has doubled in recent years, according to NHS figures. Jenni is joined by Samuel Pollen, author of ‘The Year I Didn’t Eat,’ a novel for young people about a boy with anorexia, and Dr Sandeep Ranote, Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist at the North West Boroughs Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.Does ‘the black tax’ exist in UK venture capital? An article published Goodsoil Venture Capital says there is reason to believe that black women-led businesses have a lower probability of securing venture capital investment than their male and female counterparts. Jenni is joined by Senior Partner at GOODsoil Venture Capital, Charmaine Hayden and tech entrepreneur and founder of the Women in the City Afro-Caribbean Network, Mariam Jimoh.Edinburgh-based St Andrew’s Children’s Society is working with LGBT nightclubs to encourage awareness of LGBT adoption. Why choose a nightclub to promote adoption? And why are there relatively few LGBT couples adopting in Scotland in the first place? Rita Grant is the Adoption Support Manager at St Andrew’s Children’s Society and Tor Docherty is the Chief Executive of New Family Social, a UK charity supporting LGBT adopters.Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Laura Northedge Interviewed Guest: Tom Kerridge Interviewed Guest: Samuel Pollen Interviewed Guest: Sandeep Ranote Interviewed Guest: Mariam Jimoh Interviewed Guest: Charmaine Hayden Interviewed Guest: Rita Grant Interviewed Guest: Tor Docherty

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the podcast for Wednesday 27th February for Woman's Hour. Now Tom Kerridge is a Michelin starred chef who famously lost 12 stones by changing his lifestyle. Today he cooks the perfect roasted winter sprout curry from his book Fresh Start. The recruitment of gay and lesbian adoptive parents in Scotland. Why is the campaign being promoted in nightclubs? And getting a business started if you're a black, Asian or minority ethnic woman. How difficult is it to find investment?

Now it's not unusual to hear about girls and young women who suffer from an eating disorder, whether it be anorexia or bulimia. It's rare to hear about a boy or a young man, but the number of boys receiving treatment has doubled in recent years. Since 2012, the number of boys going to hospital in England, Scotland and Wales increased from 235 to 466. Professor Sandeep Ranaut is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at North West Boroughs Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and joins us from Salford. Samuel Pollan is the author of The Year I Didn't Eat, a novel for teenagers about a boy with anorexia. Samuel became anorexic when he was 12.

So why did he decide to write a novel for other young people? It's quite simple, really. It was something that I wish had existed when I was going through an eating disorder. It can be very hard to relate to a factual story I think certainly when I was going through it I sort of dismissed any story that was factual as well that's someone else, it's not my experience, it's different to me

so by writing a novel I was able to kind of draw in a range of experiences and kind of help people understand a little about the thought processes and kind of what you go through Sandy, what other books would you say might help both parents and young people who might be going through this themselves? Good morning everyone and good morning Sam It's really great to meet you A brilliant book and what I would say is the power of story is such a powerful resource that we haven't harnessed enough of

So thank you for sharing your story in a book the article in the times was fantastic um i hope you don't mind me mentioning a couple of other books that people might find helpful particularly if you're a male or a young male so one of them is weight expectations by dave chawna you may have heard of that one. And he also writes about his recovery from anorexia. And I think that hope and the story that the story of hope for other people and for families and friends and loved ones is so important in terms of how to get help, how to get treatment, how to get support, because it is available. It is out there. One of the things could I just read one sentence from Weight Expectations, because I think people will find it helpful. When I was going through the anorexia, one of the worst things was that people began to treat me differently, like something fragile that might break at any

point. That was proper isolating. And I think that's really key. This is real illness. And the people who are going through it are still people. They're people and that's really important. There's another book that's not written by somebody from the UK but of course that's important because you can get an eating disorder whoever you are and wherever you are around the world. It's called The Incredible Jake Parker by Angelo Thomas. So look out for that one as well. Particularly potentially appealing to younger males. Now, Sam, you were 12 when this happened. I know you suffered for two years.

How did you realise that you had an eating disorder? Yeah, it's not an easy thing to sort of discover. It kind of builds up over time and then before you know it it's it's happening um a kind of strange thing about eating disorders is that you you have very rational thoughts and very kind of um normal thoughts about it as well as your sort of delusional thoughts that kind of come from the eating disorder um so i sort of um kind of realized over time as as the behavior sort of built up and as i was confronted with the fact that I'd lost a huge amount of weight and I got ill, the kind of key moment was I got the flu and I was too weak to go into the doctors or to go upstairs to go to bed so we had to have a call-out doctor

and that was the sort of moment where it was like you realised how much had happened. But I mean, you called this book the year I didn't eat which is a very literal thing to say was there a year where you didn't eat I mean it's it's a title that kind of draws people into to the idea of um this whole year being dominated by food and that being the thing that Max, the character, thinks about the whole time. No, I was eating, but I was eating less and less as time went on. And how did your parents deal with it? They were, you know, I should say I was 12 years old, so I probably didn't fully understand what they were going through and kind of the conversations they were having, but they were hugely supportive.

I think Sandeep mentioned something really important there about treating people differently what they did that was that ended up being very important for me was carrying on family routines carrying on you know we still went and visited my grandparents and we still played board games together um such that not every conversation i was having was about my food about my weight um and that kind of because habits are so important to eating disorders um and they're also really important to breaking them um and that idea of having a kind of normal life that i could slip back into my parents did a amazing job for which i am very grateful um making that making that the case sandy this rise in the number of boys being treated and this assumption that we've always had for such a long time that this is only something that affects girls.

Why are we seeing it now more and more in boys? Great question. Not one that I'm going to have an easy answer for. I think like many things, it's a mixture of reasons and a mixture of reasons why we're now thankfully seeing more boys accessing help, support and treatment, whereas before we weren't seeing as many. And I speak both as a professional and as a parent. I have three boys between the ages of 11 and 17. So it's so important to me that you're covering this issue and that people are starting to speak out. I think one of the reasons we are seeing more boys is that barriers are being broken down, stigma is being reduced, people are starting to talk about not just eating disorders but a whole range of mental health conditions and mental illnesses. There's better awareness, better screening. And therefore, because of that, it has enabled and empowered young males and boys and families to seek that help,

where they may not have done before because of the stigma, because of shame, because it was seen as more acceptable illness for young women and females to have. So on one hand, it is good that we're seeing more boys accessing help. On the other hand, we do need to understand better. And there are a mixture of reasons why people get eating disorders. That was going to be my next question. What do we know about what causes them?

So, I mean, it's a mixture of things. These are neurobiological illnesses. They are real illnesses, just like diabetes, epilepsy and asthma. We know that genetic factors are involved. We know that environmental factors may be involved and social factors. Certain personality types are at a higher risk. Sam mentioned, you know, it's about habits and worrying. So people who are naturally more anxious or worriers or perfectionistic are at a

higher risk or more sensitive. We know that we're living in a different time. Our young people today are influenced by different things to what we may have been 20 and 30 years ago. That said, this is a neurobiological illness. So it's about what increases risks people talk about social media a lot and i get asked that question a lot i'm sure sam does we don't have a linkage or a cause but we know that certainly there is an impact and that um for those people at a risk of developing an eating disorder it can exacerbate or make things worse equally there are positives about social media. Body image and role models. Young males now are under pressures that potentially they weren't under decades ago

to look a certain way and be a certain way, particularly around physical health and exercise and kind of, you know, the perfect body. So there are a mixture of reasons why the pressure boys are under now is different to before. Sam, your message is to get help as soon as you possibly can. And Max, in the novel, learns about group sessions. What does he learn from that?

Yeah, well, he actually learns his own experience. He's kind of yeah we actually learned his his own experience kind of reading about them online and his own experience is very isolated and i felt that was that was what i wanted to write about because that was my own experience i didn't know other people that were going through eating disorders that when i was um going through one um but absolutely other people that kind of understanding that other people are going through and have gone through i think is a really important um thing for people i know that some people get going through it and have gone through it, I think is a really important thing for people. I know that some people get a lot of succour and comfort from talking to other people who are going through it,

and that's become one of the, talking about positive sides of social media, that's become much easier to connect with other people who have had the experience. Sandy, Sam's character lists some horrific things that can go wrong in his body and we know this is a serious condition which can kill what would you say to anybody who's listening to this program who's concerned either about themselves or about their child what i would say is lots of what we've said already is think about if you were worried about

your daughter or your son having diabetes for instance what would you do do not suffer alone do not suffer in silence it's so important to speak to someone you trust to go and access help from your GP or indeed we have a fantastic organisations like BEAT, the National Eating Disorder Association charity, that have helplines and support lines that can guide you and guide you to get that early help as soon as possible. We have the NHS websites. The important thing is to speak to somebody. We're doing so much more work with schools where young people spend most of their time um so you can also access that information advice through schools but the key is speak to somebody because you can get help and sam you're much older now obviously

how are you around food now um i'm i'm fine around food you know everyone has some peculiarities around food I think and that's and that's definitely true of me today but one thing that I really wanted to capture in the book is that and one thing that seemed kind of baffling and so unlikely to me when I was going through an eating disorder is that you could recover completely and have a normal relationship with food where you go out for dinner and you eat whatever you want at home and you don't really think about it too much day to day. And that's definitely been the case for me nearly two decades now. And I think that's really important.

Although, tragically, a lot of people do continue to struggle for years or decades and their eating disorders don't go away, lots of people do. And I think that's a really important thing to hear if you're going through it samuel pollen and professor sandeep run out thank you very much indeed both of you for being with us this morning and this will be next week's podcast for parents you can download it and listen to it again and really thank you both very much we'd also like to hear from you if you're a parent of someone who has an eating disorder or a young person with an eating disorder, please

let us know. Now next week has been dubbed LGBT Adoption and Fostering Week with the aim of encouraging more gay and lesbian couples and single people to adopt and foster children in need. There's been a rise of some

75% of children in Scotland in care away from home since 2004. An adoption society there has decided to try a new idea to encourage people to think about taking on a child. The St Andrews Children's Society, which is based in Edinburgh, is planning to target gay bars and clubs. Tor Dochtie is the Chief Executive of New Family Social. Rita Grant is the Adoption Support Manager at the St Andrews Children's Society and is in Edinburgh. Rita, why is there a shortage of LGBT people coming forward to adopt or foster when obviously the need is so great?

I know, Jenny, we often say that in our agency ourselves um i think that there are some there are still some myths that need to be dispelled about gay and lesbian people becoming parents to adopt to children who need adoption very often when we have people come to our agency for inquiries or to come on our preparation courses they're quite taken aback at just how welcoming and delighted we are to have our gay and lesbian friends come in to look after children who cannot stay with their birth family so we feel and i know many people who are doing this kind of work we feel very strongly about wanting to dispel some myths and invite our gay and lesbian friends to consider adoption and I think what's very interesting for the people who have come through our agency they've often said

to us I never really thought we could become a mum or a dad and in a sense why not you know straight couples don't ask that question and why should why should they have to ask that question now i know that you and your partner have two children birth children and then adopted a boy what prompted that decision hi um we had had two children that we conceived through a clinic at a time when there were only three clinics in the country that would see a same sex couple. And we gained a bit of confidence as parents. You know, when we first brought our son home, I didn't know how you changed a nappy or anything. I knew nothing. And so we gained confidence over the next couple of years.

And by the time we were thinking, well, maybe there's room for a third child in our family we thought maybe adoption was the way and I sometimes would you know look at have a nice day with my children and think there are some children who don't have this they're not settled in the way that my children are and I just started to think that maybe that third space in our family could be for a child who had already been born but who didn't have that certainty. Now Rita it's been thought of in some areas as a little bit controversial that you're targeting clubs and bars why are you doing it that way? I suppose we just thought would be a little bit different and go to where the gay lesbian community congregate and meet. It's a relaxed and informal setting.

And whilst we have had open evenings for LGBT people at our agency, we just thought, well, let's do something different. It's LGBT week. Why don't we come to them? So how will you manage it? What will you actually do in the clubs or the bars to put forward your campaign? OK, well, we have a room booked, obviously, and we have a small presentation ready to share with the people who will attend.

We also have some of our approved adopters. They're all gay men who are coming to the different venues to talk from their own experience of what it was like to be approved, what it was like to go through the process of home study, and indeed then to be linked and matched with their child or children. We feel it's always lovely for prospective adopters to hear from adopters who've gone through the process.

They give it something very real and a real quality that no matter how great the social workers are, I think hearing it from the people who have gone through the process with our agency, it's just, there's something more real and authentic about that. Tor, what was it like to go through the process of approval and then adopting your little boy? I was nervous when we started phoning adoption agencies.

I didn't know whether they would be welcoming to us or not. And I would have loved if somebody handed me a leaflet in a bar saying, you're welcome at our agency. We didn't have that, and so I cold-called agencies to see who would want us, who would take us. I was so nervous that I thought the best thing to do was tell them everything bad up front because I had a list of reasons in my mind

why I thought we'd be rejected. So I just blurted all of those out and included in that list was that we were a same-sex couple. I now know that adoption agencies want people whose life has had bumps in the road because if your life has been very straightforward, that's lovely, but it means that you haven't really been tested against stress

and maybe your relationship hasn't been through the mill a little bit. Whereas Jackie and I were able to say, you know, we've had this bump in the road, we've had this health problem and so on and we were able to show that we've come through difficult times and they were very, very welcoming of that. And how does it work now? When you go out as a family you and the three children how do people regard you um generally fine people don't ever assume that we're a family on site

so that's um it's a shame really we're often asked who we all are to each other um we did once go into a pizza restaurant and the waiter said are you guys a family family? And we were like, yeah. And he went, oh, that's amazing. And then he came back and he said, you know what, it's on the house just to celebrate. And it was just such a lovely thing. I would have more adopted children if I thought I'd get more free pizza. So it's fine

and it's generally okay. We don't meet open hostility really at all. I know that some people do. But that thing of knowing that other families are doing it as well and having families to lean on is fantastic. Tor Doherty and Rita Grant, thank you both very much indeed for being with us this morning. Now still to come in today's programme, Tom Kerridge.

Now half the size of his former self cooks the perfect roasted winter sprout curry from his book Fresh Start. And the serial, the third episode of Maya Angelou's A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Now, a podcast for parents is published today and it is available to download. It's about how you should introduce alcohol to your teenager. That is, if you're going to introduce it at all. You'll also find an article with tips about it on the Woman's Hour website

now don't forget you can subscribe to Woman's Hour on BBC Sounds you may have missed a discussion earlier in the week about the sexual harassment of students and how they fail to report it or a woman who is obsessed with wolves and follows them

around the world and even likes to kiss them. You really don't want to miss that one. Now, anyone who's trying to set up a business needs some sort of financial backing. Venture capitalists are the people you go to if the bank, as is often the case, says no. But there's evidence that black, Asian and minority ethnic women who have a good idea and want to get started are having difficulty getting any kind of financial support

through the usual routes. Why? Well, Charmaine Hayden is a senior partner at Good Soil Venture Capital. Mariam Jimo is the founder of the Woman in the City Afro-Caribbean Network, and she's an entrepreneur trying to raise funds for a new technology company. So how, Mariam, are you trying to set up a business and what sort of business are you trying to set up is a tech-enabled marketplace that would allow people to access international and ethnic groceries from across the UK.

So pretty much London is kind of focused, a very multicultural hub. So what, delivery? Exactly. You make the food and then deliver it to them? Not necessarily make the foods, but utilise stores that already exist in the UK in different pockets of London and make that accessible across the UK. So if you're in Chelsea, you can still get foods that you may only be able to get in, say, Peckham.

So that's kind of the concept. And how has the search for funding gone? So I managed to do quite a small friends and family round. So I raised amongst people I knew. And then now I'm kind of looking for a kind of pre-seed before I go into my seed round. What's a pre-seed? Come on, this is business, you have to explain. So a seed round would be something you need to kind of start your idea and get your idea off the ground. I guess a pre-seed would be something that you would need to sort of get to the point where you can do that.

So some businesses are a bit more complicated. They need a little bit more funding. For me, my business is app-based, so development and so on and so forth takes... You need some cash to get to the point where you can start. So, Charmaine, how does somebody like Marianne go to get the cash? Hello? Charmaine? like mariam go to get the cash hello charmaine hello oh hello there you are i thought i'd lost you there my question was how does someone like mariam looking for cash to set up her business go about it um well in an ideal world she'd just go and pitch to some some some angel investors or some venture capital firms um otherwise she'd raise the revenue um

organically through her company um but in reality there are a number of challenges that she may face what sort of challenges um well specifically um if you're looking at something that's focused on um an ethnic group um it may be frowned upon because it may be looked at as a niche even though you know the the group is so large and the market cap um i'll say market cap let me um basically the the number of people that it's potentially would potentially buy are huge it's still kind of seen as a niche in the same way that Pinterest was initially kind of fobbed off because people thought oh it's just targeted at women this isn't a problem this isn't something that that people care about let's not pay attention to it. And in fact, that's like one of the world's unicorns and a unicorn being a company valued at over a billion dollars.

So yeah, just kind of an example of that. A lot of work and research, Charmaine, seems to have been done about this question in the United States, but not in the United Kingdom. Why do you suppose that is? Well, I think that it's a relatively new space here. I think that Europe and the UK are a lot more rigid in the way that they do stuff, in the way they fund opportunities.

There's so few senior partners that are from ethnic minority backgrounds to be able to have a voice enough. So, you know, you have to be in a position to be able to have a voice enough. So, you know, you have to be in a position to be able to say, actually, I'm going to call you out. And you have to feel psychologically safe in order to do that. So if you're a token person that's been recruited as a VC member, especially where, you know,

diversity is such a hot topic, sometimes people recruit just for the sake of it and don't actually give people real powers in the process um and if that's the case and that makes it a lot more difficult to kind of to to inch your way to to um having a real conversation ma'am what happens when you go to pitch for money what sort of response do you get so i mean i'm quite early in my process i've i've only experienced it a couple of times but i think often you're asked you know quite intense questions and i feel like what sort of intense questions um you might be grilled a bit more on like your business model and you know you know

the general things that you're supposed to be um asked but probably just a little bit harsher with some undertones or microaggressions in the questions like, how do you feel you could build a team? Which really means, okay, will people listen to you? Or will you be able to command a group of people who aren't also black women? And I think that's a really touchy point

that there is this structural bias that people have before you've even opened your mouth as soon as you've entered a room and they use that to kind of judge how hard they're going to be on you they kind of see you as much more of a risk because they're not familiar with you so that definitely that definitely controls the narrative in terms of how they question you or get you to pitch. Charmaine from what you've written there are very few black women in senior positions in the venture capital area why? Well there's a number of great reasons I guess typically the VC network comes from an old boys club that started with Harvard graduates and when it came to the UK it would be kind of largely like Oxford, Cambridge graduates,

in which they're, you know, if you're not like a fellow graduate there, which the likelihood is kind of minimal of someone from that background. And then people just generally aren't willing to give opportunities. And then, you know, when raising funding, because obviously a VC has to raise funding also, it's very likely that they're going to if they're they you know if they're a senior partner and they want to raise a fund to distribute um that they're going to face difficulties because generally vcs start with family money um so they'll be like from a rich family or have rich friends and friends um in their network who contribute towards their first fund to be able to build a track record.

If you don't come from that background, then going to institutional investors and saying, hey, we need money to be able to invest in people so that we can increase diversity. You're likely to kind of meet a lot of hurdles if you don't have that initial funding. So what are the consequences for women like mariam of facing these kind of barriers what happens to their business idea um which usually push to the side um people usually invest in people that they that look like them with problems that they understand that are you know if it affects their immediate circles um and someone like marion going across that, even if she does come across a black woman who's in VC

or, you know, who kind of understands the problem, she's going to have the black tax, which is just where we call the black tax a situation where someone actually might feel like, you know, what's a bigger risk for me because I don't feel psychologically safe to make these grand decisions. People are going to judge me if I invest in another black person because they think that I'm just doing it as a favor and I haven't really done proper due diligence and that's a problem also Charmaine

Hayden and Mariam Jima the very best of luck keep plugging away I'm sure it'll happen thank you both very much indeed for being with us this morning. Now, you may well know Tom Kerridge from the television. You may have eaten in one of his Michelin-starred restaurants. You're almost certain to know he once weighed 30 stones and he lost 12 of them by changing his lifestyle. Well, he's now published a cookery book called Fresh Start, How to Cook Amazing Food at Home and today we'll cook the perfect

roasted winter sprout curry. Now Tom I have to say I thought winter sprouts really? How are you going to make these sprouts utterly delicious? I'm going to turn them into a curry. I mean that's what we're going to do. I mean if you think about

the effects of sprouts what could make them even more fabulous turning them into a curry that's what I what we're going to do i mean if you think about you know if you think of the effects of sprouts what could make them even more fun is turning them into a curry that's what i thought of doing here we're making sprouts fun i mean for me sprouts are amazing and they do seem to have this marmite effect on people but the reality they're just tiny cabbages and cooked well they taste fantastic all right so how do we cook them well okay how do we make this dish so the first thing we've got is sprouts that have been marinated in ground turmeric and some ground coriander. Okay. So they've kind of like sat there and just absorbed all those lovely spices and flavours. I'm going to stick them into a pan on this amazing, this is an amazing stove you've got in here.

It's famous. Yeah. And we're going to start cooking them through. And basically they're not, they're not blanched. So a lot of the problem that you have with sprouts quite often is the fact that they are, they're seen as being, they get boiled, okay? So people boil them in salted water and they get cooked for so, so long that they lose all that texture. If you kind of look at stir-frying them and cooking them and making them feel that they're,

it keeps some freshness and vibrancy about them that's where they start tasting amazing okay so the sprites are in the pan and then in a separate pan i've got some onions that i've sliced and caramelized and they're going to be cooked out so the beautiful thing about onions is they've got this lovely amazing texture and flavour that comes from it they have a natural sweetness they've got these lovely natural sugars in them so as you cook them and they caramelize them more all of those flavours are drawn out okay now that I know there are lots of other things that have to go in but whilst you carry on cooking it why fresh start cooking at home why was that really important to you so for me i've gone through this period so i've written the last two cookbooks before that have been about

weight loss the first one the dopamine diet was um about it being a low carbohydrate diet and it was my own personal journey because i mean people had seen i've been on television and i've done bits and bobs but i'd made a decision when I was approaching my 40th birthday you know things you know once you get a little bit older and there's certain points in your life and and I think when you're in your 20s and 30s you don't really recognize it or realize it but I think as you get older and when there's certain you know there's a measurement of things and it hit me that okay I'm getting to 40 and it's a point in your life it's a point of reflection where you start going okay so I've achieved whatever I've done in those last 40 years am I quite happy where I'm at where am I going to be in the next 40 years and I think that was the point where I thought

actually do you know what the reality is if I keep going the way I'm going I'm not going to be around for another 40 years. How were you going I mean what was your lifestyle before you made this change party like it was like it was party it was fun it was like a constant drive of highs and buzzes of like I love cooking and service and being a chef and everything about a chef is you know you I love the lifestyle of it and I it's very left field it's quite rock and roll it's late nights it's early mornings it's there isn't you live a life as a chef you know the one thing that you do do is you kind of pretty much give up on sleep because you're too busy working playing hard having like really enjoying the whole connection with the hospitality industry and and and knowing you know to get so big yeah as big as you did

you must have been consuming all the wrong things i suspect beer or a huge amount yeah beer was massive and beer was a huge part of my life alcohol was alcohol was huge and i've touched on it a number of times before and it was one of those things where you finish service and you need that acceleration that buzz that thing you don't just stop at 11 30 midnight and go home to bed then you need to be so i'm so alcohol became quite a huge part of my life and volume i loved volume and just consumption everything about everything for me was just always about trying to get as much in as possible we were talking earlier to sam about the eating disorder that he suffered from when he was a boy which of

course was anorexia how would you describe what you were going through? Was there some sort of eating disorder in what you were doing? Yeah, although it wasn't necessarily about food, it was about a release and a... I think when there's issues regarding... Alcohol was a big thing. There is an alcohol problem on Tito. I haven't touched alcohol now for just over five, nearly six so it's one of those um that became an issue and the eating became it it wasn't

any I mean that became just eating the wrong things at the wrong time of night and just all about a carefree attitude completely no no respect for what I was eating or what it was doing for my body just wanting to consume um but the mentality of it, the mental state of it, was one that, it's also, it's one that I don't regret, but it's one that I can't get back to because it's a release of an energy of you run a business and the pressures that you're under of cooking to a level of two mission stars

and running the business and people's lives. And there's always needs to be a release. So for me, it was trying to take, make sure that that was always something, the mental state of what i was doing was huge the sprouts and onions are smelling lovely good need i worry about them are they all right you don't need to worry about them i'm just making sure that they're getting hot enough on on the famous cooker it's a very famous i love it i you know i may well take it home afterwards how are you dealing with the change because massive weight loss is often really hard to sustain yeah so it is if you're viewing

being on a diet as a diet so if you view it as and diet so what happens with diets is diet has been thrown out there as a term as a word that people see as depressing and boring and and and that is uh it means you're trying to lose weight however diet is actually just the way that you eat not necessarily about losing weight so if you change the way that you eat or your outlook to life or what you do and have and take a massive interest and you concentrate and as well it's so much about the mental shift in how you view food and you look at it as a balance and you go actually what I want to do is make sure that food becomes um are you concentrating the food that you can eat and and how you enjoy eating and how you can cook at home how you can encourage kids to eat how you can encourage your whole lifestyle becomes very very different so the maintenance of it

it can't be short term so you have to choose a way of eating or a lifestyle that you can see is sustainable forever now you did your television series on the fresh start with families learning to cook both the adults and the children but how easy when they go away is it for them day to day to find the time to cook and avoid the convenience food so the reality i mean that's the one thing that everybody talks about is is time and being time poor and time short and however it's about priority and finding priorities and a lot of that is you know you can batch cook stuff and put it in freezers you can find very quick and easy recipes to do you can also like if your time is you'd rather sit down for half an hour and watch a soap opera well actually that

half an hour you can cook yourself you know you can cook yourself something which is the most important and we've all got bbc iplayer now you can catch the soap you can catch eastenders later you haven't got to watch it at the time that it's on you know you can it's about prioritizing what you do and how you view your life and i tell you what with the show the most amazing thing for me was um the journey of the the show was fantastic over the 12 weeks but actually how that lifestyle change had happened to so many families that we took on that journey that was so encouraging. The mental state of everyone was so much happier. Everyone was enjoying the food that they were doing.

And the beautiful thing, I suppose, is encouraging kids to be a part of it is that that self-responsibility is then it's not just about you. It's about your life and your family. And that was really good in the maintenance of it. Now, listen, we've got to get the cereal on shortly. And so you're going to finish that and I'm going to in the maintenance of it. Now listen, we've got to get the cereal on shortly and so you're going to finish that and I'm going to have it for my lunch, I hope. Just one more question.

You made a bizarre revelation which people were really surprised about. Tinfoil. What is the tinfoil story? Well, that sent Twitter into meltdown and it was like it was it was bananas right and it was stories in the mail and the express and it was like it was like i mean literally there's two sides to tinfoil there's a shiny side and a dull side and as a chef and for me i'd always been taught that the shiny side you put on top of the food when you put it

into the oven because it's reflective so as the food when you put it into the oven because it's reflective so as heat comes up it reflect it reflects the heat back better now that's all there's two sides that for me i'll go that's how it works okay and then there were loads of people go god yeah of course that makes complete sense that's it and then i had like mental nut cases going at me going no no no there's a it's completely it doesn't matter what it like it i mean it went the world went crazy over two sides of tinfoil however i still cook with a shiny side down because it just makes complete sense to me and if tom carragher's cooks with the shiny side down we will all cook with the shiny side down i have a mouthful i'm afraid of the perfect roasted winter sprout curry just quickly tom tell me what else went in it there are lots of seeds it's absolutely gorgeous by the way

caraway seeds cumin seeds there's turmeric in there there's the coriander the spicing that goes with it but it's not too hot so there's a bit of green chili that's gone into that but it's all about the flavor. So it's trying to drive, make sprouts not necessarily taste like sprouts, trying to encourage them. Texturally, they're still crunchy, they're crisp, they taste delicious. And then you've got the soft paneer cheese mixed with it and the caramelisation of the onions

and just all mixed together in a little bit of veg stock. It's very simple, but it does taste lovely. Could you come and cook for us every day? I tell you what, if you get a new cooker, I'd definitely be... And I was talking to Tom Kerridge. Now, we had lots of response to the eating disorder question. This one said, my son started to have anorexia in his mid-20s, so not a boy but a man, and was much better at 29.

I don't think he'll ever not have some problems with food. It is a disease that can kill. His weight dropped so low that he had many problems associated with malnutrition, as many body functions closed down and he had mental health problems because his mind also didn't work very well. He had good support in Cornwall, but he thinks he recovered through mindfulness and taking control of his own recovery. Like many people, the anorexia may have been associated with his need for control, especially after a series of difficult circumstances.

I have not asked his permission to write this, so please don't use my name. And then a tweet, we are five months into the battle with anorexia with a 16 year old son. Devastating, consuming and exhausted. We're not giving up and live in hope that he will recover. Facebook support page has been a lifesaver for me as his mum, who is a full-time caring mother at the moment. And then we came to Tom Kerridge and the sprout curry and the conversation about tinfoil. And Lawrence Brown said, how can anyone argue with Tom Kerridge? It makes perfect sense. And I have tested this theory,. Half half shiny and dull on the same dish. And although there is no noticeable cooking difference, there is a different browning outcome. With the shiny side down giving a much better result.

And John Moore said, love Tom's cooking. Can you ask him why they can't make tinfoil shiny both sides? Then it won't matter. Now do join me, if you can, for tomorrow's programme when I'll be talking to the author Maggie Gee. She joins me to talk about her latest novel, which is called Blood. It's an exploration of some of the darker human emotions in a literary comedy with dashes of thriller, elements of farce, criminal caper and political satire.

So join me tomorrow, two minutes past 10 for today. Bye bye. Did you know that technology can make us kinder to one another? Did you hear about the diver who walked out of the sea onto a Portuguese beach, dragging the internet behind him? Did you realize that how you speak to the little robot helper in your house might cement age-old stereotypes for decades to come?

I'm Alex Kretosky, and those are just some of the stories that we've looked at in The Digital Human, the podcast that explores what it means to be human in the digital age. If you want to hear more, and I guarantee we will surprise you, come check us out exclusively on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies.

I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service,

The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.