Carol Vorderman has told HELLO! magazine how she is having 50 birthday parties throughout the year to mark her 50th birthday – she reaches the half century landmark on Christmas eve – and she is determined to be slimmer by the end of the year.
“I’m working out five times a week and I want to get my waist back to a 24 before I allow myself into the shops to buy a party dress,” the former Countdown presenter told HELLO!.
Carol says she was a size eight in her twenties, but went up to a size 14 due to pregnancy and pressures of work. “Unfortunately television always adds another dress size to you, so I probably looked like a 16 for a while. In fact, people are always coming up to me and saying ‘You don’t look nearly as big as you do on TV!”
Carol went back to a size eight after a detox diet but says she has fluctuated every since. “I never weigh myself,” she says. “I just put on my ‘cruel’ trousers. They are a pair of tight sating trousers which I first wore on Find a Fortune. When they are tight, I know I have to lose weight.”
She plans to wear a variety of outfits for her various celebrations this year. She tells HELLO! how she wants so have a Mamma Mia!-themed party. “I’ve decided to don a pair of dungarees and plaits,” she says, adding that she is going to ask her friend Kathryn Apanowicz [partner of her late Countdown colleague Richard Whiteley] if they can hold the event at her villa in Portugal.
Her other celebrations will include small tea parties with family and friends and “big affairs with caterers and balloons” and celebrity guests Gok Wan, Alan Carr and Michelle Mone. One celebration will see Carol learning to mid-air wing walk.
The presenter, who is mum to Katie, 18, and Cameron, 15, says she is content with her life but reveals she is currently single. “I split up with Des Kelly, my long-term partner, earlier this year,” she tells HELLO!. “I’m happy and I live with the people who are most important to me – Katie, Cameron and Mum.
Does she have any regrets? “Well, quite a few,” she says. “I should never have got married the first time round. And there are plenty more mistakes I have made.” “I’m determined that after my 50th, I’m going to enjoy a far more normal life.”