Fitness personality Joe Wicks has revealed that he’s kept his children far away from McDonald’s.
The health guru, 40, with millions of followers on social media, has made a name for himself doling out healthy lifestyle advice and getting the public active. And his guidance doesn’t end at the front door.
When he’s not putting in a shift as the nation’s PE teacher, he’s busy raising his four young children – Indigo, eight, Marley, seven, Leni, three and Dusty, two – with his wife Rosie.
Although for many eating your first Big Mac or downing a fistful of Maccies French fries at the motorway services with your family might be a core memory, that’s not the case for the Wicks clan.
As the Body Coach revealed in a new interview, none of his kids has eaten at the fast food chain, and, one to practice what he preaches, he’s also swerved the popular joint for the past decade.
‘They’ve never had McDonald’s,’ he told Cathy Newman of Times Radio while promoting his new cookbook, Healthy Start.
He went on to explain: ‘I haven’t had McDonald’s, and I used to love like a sausage and egg McMuffin in the mornings. It was my thing. So I would go 7am before my boot camp, and I’d have a sausage egg McMuffin with a hash brown…’
All that changed when he met his wife in 2015, however, and the pair shared one last trip to McDonald’s before he cut it from his life.
He continued: ‘The night I met her, actually, we’re driving back from a rave, and we stopped at the 24-hour McDonald’s in Wandsworth, and that was because she really wanted to have McDonald’s. So that was the last time we had McDonald’s.’
His aversion to feeding his kids fast food like McDonald’s may stem from his own childhood, which he’s previously said was full of ‘ultra-processed food’.
‘I had a very unhealthy diet as a child,’ he told RTE.
He continued: ‘Any money that came through the door was not going on healthy protein sources and vegetables – it just wasn’t. So I lived off ultra-processed food and frozen dinners.
‘My mum was 15 when she was kicked out of school and left home; she didn’t have the skills and knowledge to cook – it was not in her vocabulary.’
He shared that nowadays he struggles to consume those foods ‘in moderation’.
In fact, his new cookbook is all about healthy meals for all the family, in the hopes of offering those with children ‘nourishing, easy and enjoyable’ recipes that work for everyone.
As for his approach to parenting, he also had strong thoughts on kids snacking in between mealtimes.
Explaining that it’s no sweat when kids kick up a fuss at mealtimes, with the promise of just reheating the food when they’re hungry, he explained his reservations around offering ‘lots of snacks’ to wee’uns.
‘I think we live in an environment where we’re taught to sort of give snacks and this sort of in between meals all the time, so constantly grazing and little children have quite small tummies.
‘So try and avoid snacking, try to just wait,’ he advised.