By Claire Toureille for MailOnline
Last year, the couple appeared on James Martin’s Saturday Kitchen, where they revealed a boat disaster during a long weekend to Copenhagen sparked their weight loss.
‘We have always been big, we’ve always been half-heartedly dieting, but we went to Copenhagen for a long weekend, and the two of us hired a solar panel boat,’ James explained.
‘This boat picked up quite a lot of speed, and we’re trying to slow it down but the momentum of it, first carried us into the harbour and then it carried us closer and closer so you could see the people getting more and more alarmed.
After deciding to shift the pounds in 2018 James lost 9st 11lbs while husband Paul shed 10 stone.
‘And then we just slammed on the side of it, quite a crash, Paul then tries to get out, falls over on the jetty,’ James went on.
The cherry on top, he explained, was when a boiled egg the couple had nicked from their breakfast restaurant fell out of Paul’s pocket as he fell.
Paul admitted the incident happened when the couple was at their biggest, with James weighing 28st and Paul 25st to 26st.
Soon after, the pair were approached by the Davina McCall to lose some weight for her TV show This Time Next Year, and James explained it had felt like ‘the perfect opportunity to take it seriously ans try to lose what we needed to lose.’
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Quickly, the couple shifted the pounds at an incredible rate, which helped the soaring success of of their blog and Instagram account, which they initially set up in 2014.
‘We started a blog because we wanted somewhere to put our recipes on and talk about ourselves,’ James explained.
‘It just started picking up, we went from 1,000 followers to 10,000 to 100,000 followers,’ he said, before adding that ‘the last year [had] been crazy following the release of their cookbook.
Speaking of James Martin’s Saturday Morning on ITV, the couple explained they provided recipes that people could use as a base, to which they could add whatever they wanted
The couple, who love to cook, were motivated to publish a weight loss recipe book after seeing recipes shared in slimming groups and thinking they could do better.
‘What we try to do is take a basic recipe, like say, a salad, and add little bits in,’ James explained.
‘Our recipes are very much about “here’s the standard, here’s the core of it, do what you want with i”,” he added.