Jackie ‘O’ Henderson has opened up about her negative relationship with food and struggle with binge-eating, revealing the insane amount she’d consume each day.
In her tell all memoir, The Whole Truth, the 49-year-old radio star revealed she has always had issues surrounding food and tried every diet like the lemon detox and keto.
But in the times she wasn’t dieting, Jackie says she was ‘binge-eating all weekend’, insisting her healthy habits will ‘start on Monday’.
‘I’ve never had a clinical eating disorder, but I have always had a very unhealthy relationship with the way I view eating,’ she writes.
Jackie says during her childhood, she would set her alarm for 5am each morning and make toast with white bread lathered with ‘peanut butter and butter (double the butter!), or butter and cinnamon sugar’.
During her marriage to now ex-husband Lee Henderson, Jackie’s diet once consisted of ‘hamburgers, hot chips and pizza’, and one night she consumed a whole jar of Nutella and a glass of champagne for dinner.
She highlights the ‘vulnerable’ moment’s Lee would point out her weight gain and how they have stuck with her to this day.
‘I remember getting changed in the walk-in wardrobe, standing there naked and vulnerable, and Lee walked past and I caught him looking at me in the mirror with an expression of disdain or disgust. I’ll never forget that look. Sometimes he would wrap an arm around me and grab a spare tyre. ”Look at that!” he’d say as a joke, but I wondered if it really was.’
Jackie ‘O’ Henderson has opened up about her negative relationship with food and struggle with binge-eating, revealing the insane amount she’d consume each day. Pictured: Jackie at the ACRAs in 2022 (left), and the following year (right)
It got to the point where Lee suggested she undergo a full body scan ‘because he thought I was obese’.
‘I went and got one … and I wasn’t obese,’ she continues. ‘I was overweight, though. Probably just eating my feelings, and my palette wasn’t discerning.’
Later on in her memoir, Jackie explained her recent weight loss came down to strict diet and exercise after overcoming her addiction battle with drugs and alcohol.
‘Naturally, after three years of sitting on a lounge consuming copious amounts of fast food, alcohol an sedatives that slow down the metabolism, the body will go into shock and shed the kilos when that stops,’ she writes.
‘Rumours circled that I was taking Ozempic — because surely I must be on the weight loss wonder drug to have had a transformation so dramatic.’
Jackie’s weight gain got to the point where her now ex-husband Lee Henderson (left) suggested she undergo a full body scan ‘because he thought I was obese’. Pictured in 2004
It comes as Jackie revealed the shock extent of her drug and alcohol addiction in images taken moments before her rehab stint.
Photos of the star, who checked into the Betty Ford Clinic for drug and alcohol addiction in 2022, show her smoking her last cigarette while awaiting the results of a Covid test.
In the picture, Jackie’s Chanel handbag lays face down next to her as she lights up the cigarette while sitting in the gutter of a car park outside the admissions office.
Another image shows Jackie flying business class as she travels ‘incognito on the way to California and rehab’.
The never-before-seen pictures have been unveiled in her new memoir which chronicles the radio star’s extensive drug use.
In the memoir, Jackie explains she started taking ‘codeine pills with a glass of wine’ in a bid to escape reality.
‘It was casual at first, until it wasn’t. Truth be told, while over the years when times got tough, I’d go to the chemist and grab myself some Nurofen Plus to take the edge off, now it was different,’ she writes.
‘To experience any kind of high, I had been taking roughly ten Nurofen Plus tablets at once for years. Now that I was deeper into my addiction, I was taking that much three or four times a day.’
Jackie admitted her addiction began taking a turn for the worse following her divorce from Lee Henderson, to whom she married from 2003 until 2018.
Jackie’s diet once consisted of ‘hamburgers, hot chips and pizza’, and one night she consumed a whole jar of Nutella and a glass of champagne for dinner
Never-before-seen pictures have unveiled in her new memoir which chronicles the radio star’s extensive drug use
The divorce saw her spending less time with daughter Kitty, now 13, which made her suffer with excruciating bouts of sadness and loss.
‘In an attempt to cope with the loneliness and guilt I was feeling, I made another bad decision. I began taking sleeping pills — Stilnox — on the days I was alone, as a way to numb the loneliness,’ she continues.
‘It was a coward’s way of dealing with my pain, finding comfort in what was slowly becoming an addiction.’
Jackie details the great lengths she would go to conceal her addiction from friends and explained how she would hide and dispose of the empty pill packets kept in her home.
‘I didn’t want to put them in a bin… I kept them all in a white plastic bag instead, and then at the end of two weeks I would dump my disgrace into a random bin on the way to work,’ she adds.
Photos from the book show Jackie smoking her final cigarette while awaiting the results of a Covid test before checking in to rehab
The media star went on to open up about her rapid weight gain during the peak of her addiction, which she says was brought on by drinking ‘a bottle of wine’ or a gin and tonic, all while taking Stilnox, then ordering UberEats ‘every day’ during Covid.
When Jackie took her break from the show in 2022, her co-host Kyle Sandilands told listeners she was stepping away to ‘focus on her health’ after contracting COVID-19.
But she was instead checking into the Betty Ford Clinic to combat her addiction.
Jackie admitted she was ashamed of her secret, fearing public judgement, and decided to get help after hitting rock bottom.
She also revealed she asked permission from her daughter Kitty to share her story publicly and praised her for treating her with ‘compassion’.
‘I couldn’t be more proud of my daughter, the way she has been about it has been zero judgement, just compassionate and support,’ Jackie said.
Jackie said she wanted to publicly speak about her addiction battle to reduce the ‘stigma’ around drug dependence and ‘normalise’ it.
The presenter apologised to listeners for not revealing her health struggles before and revealed she will be marking two years of sobriety in a matter of weeks.
‘I want to apologise to our listeners and everyone in my life […] I just needed to concentrate on that part first, that recovery,’ she said.
The Whole Truth by Jackie ‘O’ Henderson is available in stores and online now.
