She’d only ever cook one thing, which was lasagne, because she never got educated in cooking. “Our cupboards were always full of chocolate, midget gems and Wagon Wheels. He says his mum “didn’t have a clue about nutrition” when he and his two brothers were kids. His parents split up when he was young he stayed with his mum until he went to study sports science at university, when he moved in with his dad, a roofer. I had a pretty ropey upbringing and you might have thought I’d have gone the other way,” he says. “If you had met me as a kid you would have never predicted me to be a success. Wicks was born in Epsom, Surrey, and grew up on a council estate. Of course, all that love and content I put out has come back, in the form of people buying the book. “My aim is always just to get one person a day to exercise and cook healthy food. He talks of his success in evangelical terms, with a sprinkling of cosmic balance. His Instagram recipes are brief clips of him slopping ingredients into a pan with the kind of zingy enthusiasm that makes Jamie Oliver look like Gary Barlow. Eighteen months on, he has got the books (the three so far are part of an eight-book deal, and have sold more than 1m copies), the DVD, a Channel 4 series and an ever-extending network of social media platforms that he constantly updates with recipe clips, selfies and “graduate reports”, with before-and-after shots from followers of his subscription-based 90-Day SSS Plan. In 2014, Wicks was a personal trainer with a decent-ish following on Instagram, earning, he says, “a grand a month”. Fizzy on screen, he’s surprisingly serious in person, wearing round Hockney specs that suggest he means business. He’s in Newcastle today on the second date of a UK-wide tour to promote his new DVD, in which he wears more skintight, bright-coloured lycra and shows you how to do some of his favourite HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training, which basically means doing rapid bursts of full-on muscle-mashing exercise followed by short periods of rest) moves on a tropical beach. “The whole clean-eating thing, I don’t even understand it! I’ve just had bangers and mash, don’t mean I’m dirty,” he shrugs, having just chomped down his sizable lunch. Wicks is on the cover of each, in skintight, bright-coloured lycra, showing off his lean physique, holding a burger, making a stir fry, and eating some – hang on, is that pasta? Right now they occupy the top three slots on Amazon. His plan lent itself to three books in 2016, each of which went to No 1 in the same year, a feat no other non-fiction writer – not Jamie, not Delia, not Nigella – has managed to pull off. Known to his millions of fans and followers as the Body Coach, he’s the bouncy, excitable, ridiculously sculpted figurehead of Lean in 15: exercising quickly and cooking at home so you can balance the kind of food you’re eating with your activity levels. Joe Wicks, a 31-year-old, puppyish former personal trainer who looks like Jon Snow would if he left Game of Thrones and spent the summer as an Ibiza club rep, has become the suddenly famous face of this move towards litheness.
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