Since winning The Great British Bake Off in 2015, Nadiya Hussain has seemingly had the world at her feet.
The 32-year-old has been inundated with work offers, has authored several books and was even commissioned to bake a cake for the Queen’s 90th birthday.
However, appearing on today’s Loose Women, the Luton-born star revealed that things haven’t always been as rosy as they seem.
In a candid interview, the talented chef opened up about her “crippling” anxiety condition, which has been known to leave her bed-ridden and unable to face her own children.
After Kaye Adams observed that Nadiya always looks confident, the Bake Off champion quipped: “I imagine everyone naked, that’s why!”
But her voice adopted a somewhat more serious tone as she lifted the lid on her anxiety struggles.
She revealed: “If you go back to seven or eight years ago, I just wanted to stay in bed. I couldn’t get out. And I had moments where it was just crippling.
“I was scared, and when you suffer with something like a panic disorder, there’s no answer.”
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Nadiya then surprised panellists Kaye, Andrea McLean, Nadia Sawalha and Rebekah Vardy when she estimated that she’d suffered from the condition since she was seven years old.
Nowadays, she has three children of her own, and she expressed how hard it is when the anxiety rears its head again and leaves her not wanting to talk to them.
She said: “It’s scary when you realise that you don’t even want to listen to the sound of your children’s voices.
“I’ll be like: ‘Just don’t come in my room. Don’t come anywhere near me. I’m not me right now.’ And that’s really sad.”
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Back in October, Nadiya revealed that she likes to minimise her stress levels at Christmas by delegating a lot of the housework to her husband Abdal while she does the cooking.
She wrote in her BBC Good Food column: “There is one rule in our house: if I sort the cooking, my husband does everything else – and I mean everything – so the cleaning is his domain.
“He cleans the house, he organises the bedrooms if we have people to stay over, and he keeps the paths clear of Lego and laundry.”