Clodagh McKenna: How to increase your happiness through food

When you watch Clodagh McKenna on ITV’s This Morning, she’s fresh off doing a meditation behind the scenes – and probably a dance too.

All the crew are so used to it after six years of the Irish chef appearing on the popular daytime show that, “they all know – they just walk past”.

The 50-year-old explains: “I do a meditation when I wake up in the morning, then I do another longer meditation about half an hour before I go live [and] I do my dance for five minutes in my headset all around the back of the studio. The dance is to really be myself [on live TV] and be calm inside.”

But how she eats is the main driver behind her energy and smiles we see on TV. “It’s a running joke, how many times I get asked, ‘How do you look so positive and happy?’

The answer – alongside dancing behind TV sets – is her diet, which “helps me with energy, it helps me with my mental health and it keeps me happy”.

There “isn’t enough attention” brought to the relationship between food and mood, she says, which is why it’s the centre of her ninth cookbook, Clodagh’s Happy Cooking (“a really personal book where I share my relationship with food,” she notes).

“And it’s a decision you make, to realise, ‘Oh, this really affects how I feel physically’ – when you feel light and nourished, physically, you just feel better.”

“I never eat processed foods,” she says, “Now, if I do, if I have it once in a while, if I’m at somebody’s house or something, I really feel it, or the next morning, I can really feel it. I feel my energy is low.

“It’s especially as I hit 50 this year – I’ve just got to put more consideration into the food I’m eating.”

The chef, from Cork, adds: “To change how you feed yourself is giving yourself the best gift you can give yourself in life.

“I have a lot more on but my energy and my mental health is definitely way better than in my 30s, way, way, way better!”

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These days, McKenna eats at least three to four servings of fibre-filled pulses a week, a homemade juice every morning with “celery, fresh turmeric, ginger, flat leaf parsley, lemon and spinach – I get all of that goodness into me in the morning”, and a little granola with yogurt for protein.”Doing all those things really, really helps me – my stress levels are lower. I can’t imagine [if I didn’t] how I would feel at my age, with my workload at the moment, running the farm.” (McKenna runs a sustainable farm named Broadspear, in Hampshire, with her husband Harry Herbert, on the grounds of Highclere Castle – the main location for TV’s Downton Abbey).

“It’s really about loving yourself more,” she adds, “It’s about putting you first and making sure that your engine is well oiled. It’s about looking after and feeding your body, and knowing if you do that when you’re got more energy and you’re looking after yourself everything else around you benefits from it.”

McKenna says not to try and overhaul your diet at once and instead to make small changes so they stick.

Here’s her advice…

1. Start the day with a homemade juice

“I would say, start with juicing,” she suggests. “I think that it’s quite overwhelming if you have too many things that you’re going to add into your week. So pick one thing a month [to change].

“If you don’t have a juicer, invest in a simple thing like a NutriBullet, or there are also copies – anything that will literally just blend it!

McKenna has a ‘brightening juice’ recipe with beetroot, and a ‘bloat-be-gone juice’, including pineapple, ginger and mint, or even a stronger, ‘body revival shot’.

“You’re going to do it every morning so you need to get up 15 minutes earlier, so you’re going to bed 15 minutes earlier, so just reset your clock. I go to bed incredibly early and I get up early as well,” she says.

2. Bake your own bread

Shop-bought bread can be full of preservatives, and McKenna swears by baking her own.

“Designate a time in the week where you’re very relaxed, for me that’s Saturday morning. It could be a different day for somebody else, but find that little cosy spot – time wise – and start making bread.

“I would say start with my soda bread because it’s the easiest one to do. It’s just a shape, stir, shape and bake bread – you can’t go wrong with it. There’s no rising, there’s no proofing, there’s no extra skills that you’ve got to learn.”

McKenna’s mum taught her how to make soda bread, and she says there’s something nurturing in the act of making something like bread from very basic ingredients of not much more than flour, milk and bicarbonate of soda.

“I think it’s akin to going out to pick kindling for the fire. It’s that nature-gatherer feeling. It’s so basic, it’s what our mothers would have done, our grandmothers, or great-grandmothers. So there’s like a natural instinct in us somewhere to bake bread.”

“The smell of the bread baking turns a house into a home in a matter of an hour – all the sudden it’s comforting and it’s warm. I would love the whole nation to be baking bread. But I think for anybody who’s feeling down or mentally struggling or feeling sick, baking bread should be the thing you do when you’re at your worst point, because it can only make you feel better.”

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3. Make a new recipe every week

“Pick one recipe a week that you’re going to do – don’t try and all of a sudden, cook every single night, because you’ll just hate it,” McKenna says, suggesting a day that’s not stressful. “Maybe that’s a Monday or it could be a Thursday when you’re feeling good because it’s nearly the weekend.

“Pick a simple recipe, whether it be a delicious soup, my red lentil curry – which is really easy to make – or roasting a chicken. You’re teaching yourself a new skill, and then you’ll slowly start building up your store cupboard.”

On weekends she’ll “let go” a bit – still by home cooking but, “I’ll have whatever I want, a delicious blackberry galette or I’ll make a tarte tatin, or beef bourguignon, or a delicious ragu, or chocolate beef chilli and rice, and a glass of wine. Whatever I eat, whatever I’m cooking, it’s all really good, it’s not processed, but it feels like indulgence at the weekend. Then Monday comes around and I’m kind of ready, almost craving, to get back to my pulses.”

Soon, it may become second nature to mostly cook from scratch. ” I cook every night at home and I love it. I cook every lunch, usually at home as well, says McKenna.

“I feel like I’ve not given myself enough love if I don’t cook.”

Clodagh’s Happy Cooking by Clodagh McKenna is published in hardback by Kyle Books, priced £25. Photography by David Loftus. Available 30 October.