CRIPPLED with back pain, sundays favourite celebrity cook took drastic action and dropped three dress sizes to save her career
It's hard to imagine a kitchen in modern Australia that hasn’t turned out a Donna Hay recipe. Whether you own one of her cookbooks, collect her beautiful magazines or simply tear out her weekly sunday magazine column, ‘doing a Donna’ has now entered our culinary lexicon.
But despite our familiarity with her brand – right down to the particular shade of blue synonymous with her style (it’s called ‘Donna Hay blue’, incidentally) – the woman herself remains an enigma.
Sure, we’ve seen her stride onto the MasterChef set, all high-heeled and perfectly blow-dried, but Hay’s reputation as the food equivalent of fashion’s Anna Wintour persists.
Some say she’s a food stylist, not a cook; others point to an aloofness in her manner, but the Hay who greets me at her Sydney studio is clearly a sleeves-rolled-up sort of girl.
She’s wearing a navy shift dress, ballet flats and her hair is pulled back into a messy bun – perhaps on account of the heat, but more likely so it doesn’t drop into the food. As we talk, it’s clear she’s driven, decisive but also great fun. She also fidgets. A lot.
What emerges is that Donna Hay, the brand, is in fine shape what with the books, magazines, general store, global syndication and upcoming TV show. But Donna Hay, the woman, recently endured the most frightening episode of her life, one that forced her to confront the possibility of losing it all.
Just over a year ago, Hay found herself on the living room floor at 2am, unable to move and with spasms of unbearable pain shooting through her back. Her husband, Bill Wilson, called an ambulance, and even though paramedics shot her full of morphine, Hay still winces as she remembers being carried out of the house on a stretcher.
“I have a very high pain threshold, so I panicked. Every tiny movement was like a knife jabbing into my spine.”
After shooting on the MasterChef set earlier that day, she’d gone home and thrown a casual dinner party for friends. Yes, she says, her back had been sore, but she just got on with it.
At Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, doctors initially thought she’d ruptured a bulging disc. In fact, X-rays showed she had no disc at all. “It seems it had ruptured previously and the bone was grinding on bone, with the nerves caught between,” she says. “My surgeon couldn’t tell whether it had happened when I was pregnant or some other time, because there was nothing left.”
For 12 days, Hay lay in a hospital bed, enduring excruciating cortisone injections. For someone who’d been back to work, albeit from home, within six weeks of the birth of her first child, the enforced rest was a challenge.
“I lay there, looking at the air vent on the ceiling, wondering if I was about to lose my entire career. For someone who thinks they’re in control of their life, it was very confronting, especially since they couldn’t tell me the outcome. It all depended on my recovery.”
Friends brought her coffee, which she drank through a straw, and tubs of steamed broccoli and salt and pepper tofu. Bill, a farmer and butcher, took care of their sons, Angus, 8, and Tom, 5, with the help of the family’s nanny.
Slowly, the celebrity chef got back on her feet but, because of the injections’ proximity to the nerve, she’d often collapse. “My leg would buckle. Once, I fell on my business manager; another time, I was in a bookshop and my legs went from under me.”
To Hay, the puppeteer of her own empire, it was like dangling from broken strings. Were there tears? “Totally,” she says. “When I found I couldn’t walk upstairs, I wondered what would be the point of my life. I couldn’t fathom what I’d do if I didn’t recover.”
The realisation was all the more shocking because, after years of discussions, Hay had finally agreed to film her own cooking show. Previously, the demands of young children, her publishing commitments and concerns about audience size had held her back. “If I wanted to take that much time out of my year, I wanted people to watch it,” she says bluntly. But MasterChef had shown that the public appetite for television cooking was insatiable.
With that, the pressure was on to get fit. Ultimately, she’ll need surgery on her spine, but doctors advised that strengthening her body could help delay it. So she started walking and then, six weeks later, running, in the hope that, as her back strengthens, the two grinding bones might fuse together. She also knew that a lifetime of tasting and testing new recipes, combined with sleep deprivation, had piled on the weight.
Hay now runs about 9km, mostly uphill, up to five times a week. “I go after the kids are in bed. It’s often dark, which is probably just as well because my back has left me with a bizarre running style,” she laughs.
She won’t say how many kilos she’s lost, but admits she’s dropped three dress sizes, to a 10–12. “I don’t want to set unrealistic expectations,” she says. “Professionally, I can’t get away with not eating, so I had to adjust the amount I exercise.”
When she’s not working, she mainly eats fresh produce, and despite rustling up some raspberry and white chocolate muffins for our interview, she doesn’t have one herself.
Her dramatic weight loss has garnered plenty of comments. “Everyone has been saying how good I look, which, for a while, made me wonder how bad I looked before. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoy walking into a shop knowing that anything will fit me. Previously, if something didn’t fit, I’d feel inadequate.”
It’s difficult to imagine the 41-year-old ever feeling inadequate. Over the years, she’s had her detractors, but you have to admire her chutzpah. It’s fine for her chocolate puddings to have a gooey centre, but you need internal steel to create a business the way she has. After five years as food editor of Marie Claire magazine – during which she produced four cookbooks – she spent six months as the food editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
But the dream was always to publish her own magazine. This September, the team – for Hay, it’s all about ‘the team’ – will celebrate her publication’s 10th birthday. Circulation continues at a robust 90,000, on top of which Hay has sold a staggering four million cookbooks.
She says she’s excited about her TV show, Donna Hay – Fast, Fresh, Simple, because you can convey much more visually than on paper – such as the wrist movement for twirling spaghetti into a perfect nest, or the way she forms meatballs, not in haphazard handfuls, but scooped with a measuring spoon so they’re exactly the same size.
“People might think I’m a control freak, but it’s important they’re all the same, so they cook together and one isn’t raw and another dry.”
She’s been able to embrace television, she says, because both her sons are now at school. “I have a nanny and I couldn’t do what I do without her. But little kids also need your time. It’s important to me that I’m there to play Lego and Matchbox cars.”
MasterChef has given her the confidence that comes with a pre-recorded show, after a stint doing “daunting” live segments for breakfast television. Meanwhile, she’s pragmatic about the audience: “Everyone wants people to like them, but it’s not something I can change. I’m more focused
on successful recipes.”
And, on top of the TV show, Hay is also designing a crockery and cookware range for Royal Doulton in her signature colours.
As she shows me around the test kitchen, where mushrooms are being photographed in front of an open window – natural light is another Donna Hay requirement – it’s easy to see why she’s been heralded as the successor to American lifestyle queen Martha Stewart. Beautiful napery sits alongside ribbons, plates and vintage cake tins, all designed to elevate a simple chicken breast or chocolate cake into a masterpiece.
Yet for all her styling talent, Hay is still focused on the food. She loathes nothing more than going into someone’s home and seeing a pristine, unopened copy of one of her cookbooks. Like Jamie Oliver – whom she believes is under-appreciated for his healthy food campaigns – Hay just wants people to cook and eat simply and well. “My books reflect how I like to eat. I don’t do a lot of high-stress dinner parties. I’d rather throw a butterflied lamb on the barbie and serve it with some baba ghanoush and toasted flatbread.”
In the wake of the recent floods, she predicts a return to home cooking: “We might see a healthy spike as people understand how precious life is.”
As for the influence of the internet and phone apps, Hay views it as an opportunity, rather than a threat. “It’s exciting seeing people walking round the supermarket, checking out a recipe on their iPhone. We’re looking at lots of options, whether that’s a recipe index or a feature where you compile your own cookbook.”
For now, though, she’s focused on keeping healthy and fit. “I’ve recovered really well, but it’s made me more mindful about how I treat my body. I don’t lean over a set all day, and I swim as well as run, because varied exercise strengthens my back. It would be foolish for me to carry around that much weight ever again.”
Donna Hay – Fast, Fresh, Simple premieres Tuesday March 15, at 8.30pm on The LifeStyle Channel.
