I was realizing, 'I work out all the time. Why can't I drop this weight?' It's really food. So I started dieting a little.

I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.

When I graduated from cooking school, I went to work at Stars, which was one of my favorite restaurants in the country at the time, and that's where I really learned to cook and to taste food in a discerning way.

I've always done food that can work in a set time frame. The message I'm trying to get across is, it doesn't have to take three days to do this. With planning, you can do a lot and really have quality food every day.

Between work and the kids, I never see anyone anymore. I mean, when I first met with ABC last spring, and they asked me what I'd been doing lately, I said: 'Gee, I have two kids. I'm usually covered with food, wrinkled and feel guilty all the time.

We'd go out in Larry's hippie van and drive out all around Dallas. He loved Chinese food, he'd go in and say. Remember me Major Nelson, me and my friends here are making this show called Dallas, have you got a table for us? It would work every time.

During therapy I have realised that my work ethic comes from my mum, Emma. She used to work two or three jobs at a time to keep food on the table in our council flat in Birmingham. She taught me to stay disciplined, to go to Sunday school, all those things.

I loved my mom so much because she had to work on a penny just to put food on the table... During the Depression in the United States, everybody had a tough time. And I was so hurt because she was crying that she didn't have any food for us for Thanksgiving.

We used to have prawn tempura: that was my mother's favourite dish. But she had to go out to work instead of my father, so she couldn't find the time to cook nice meals. So we ate more modern food: a lot of frozen and instant food. But I never complained about it to my mother.

There are temptations around you all the time. The trick is to work your way through anxiety or your tiredness or whatever, and not let yourself get so hungry that you're going and stopping for the burgers, and you don't view it as reward. You're doing better for yourself is eating better food.

The first recipe I made was a disaster. I'd been chopping and pressing dates to create a raw brownie, and I thought it would work even better if I blended them in a food processor. So I went and bought one specially. When my boyfriend at the time came over to try the results, he took one bite and spat it out - I'd left the plastic on the blades.

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