Dublin-born television presenter Julia Bradbury has made several changes to her lifestyle following her cancer battle.
A couple of years after getting her initial diagnosis, she said she’d been sleeping with a thin tape across her mouth to encourage her to breathe through her nose while sleeping.
After surgeons performed a mastectomy on the TV star in 2021, she received the all clear. But the road hasn’t been easy for Julia, who’s on James Martin’s Saturday Morning this weekend (April 26).
In a recent interview with The Times, she revealed that even after treatment, a doctor found reason to give her a sincere warning.
Julia Bradbury warned by doctor that she’s ‘running on a credit card’
Following the removal of a tumour from her breast in 2021, TV presenter Julia Bradbury cut out booze.
She’s more focused on her health than she’s ever been, she told The Times at the end of last year. She eats a healthy diet and exercises everyday.
When she got home from her mastectomy, she resolved to spend time outside every single day, whatever the weather. It became her mantra.
In every pursuit, she throws herself in, 100%. In her own words, she has a “fearless streak”.
But she recently had a doctor reframe that for her, in a way that seems to have struck a chord.
“He said: ‘This drive that you have – you’re running on a credit card. You can push through all sorts of things. But is that the best thing for you?’
“I realised you don’t have to win every race. You don’t have to overcome everything. I don’t want to max out the credit card.”
‘I wasn’t close to death, but death looked me in the eyes’
Julia says she wasn’t close to death. But she feels as if it looked her in the eyes, and the effect was to set her on a very particular path.
“It was a wake-up call. And it made me look at life differently. It made me prioritise my sleep, emotional health, and give more time to my loved ones. If I drink more than four units of alcohol a week, my risk of reoccurrence goes up by 28%.”
On Instagram, she shares details about her new lifestyle, from adopting a precise position on the toilet in order to avoid constipation to humming a mantra to help her destress during tense moments.
Unfortunately, she says she gets pushback from followers on social media for sharing her story.
To protect herself from social media’s ills – namely, it seems, other people – she avoids using it after six o’clock.
Cancer wasn’t the first hiccup in Bradbury’s medical history. When she became pregnant with her first baby at the age of 40, she described it as a “miracle”, since sufferers of endometriosis tend to be less likely to be able to conceive.
Julia Bradbury is on James Martin’s Saturday Morning today (April 26) at 9.30am.
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