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Lisa Wilkinson: The health transformation that revived her marriage

Lisa Wilkinson is The Weekly’s newest cover star, but privately she once despaired for the health of her husband, former star footballer Peter FitzSimons.

Everyone wants to know the secret to weight loss – and half of Australia’s most high-profile couple is ready to open up.

By giving up sugar and alcohol, Peter FitzSimons has dropped more than 40kg over the past two years.

That’s quite a turnaround for a man who used to dismiss all health nuts and teetotallers as “dickheads” – but that, he argues, is exactly what makes him qualified to convert millions of overweight Australian men.

VIDEO: Behind the scenes at Lisa Wilkinson’s cover shoot

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The 55-year-old has penned The Great Aussie Bloke Slim-Down (Penguin) to tell fellow “fatties” how to lose the lard for good. “Stop the sugar, stop the hunger,” he argues. “As for alcohol, just give it a go for a month and see if your life is not better without it.”

Peter and Lisa are clearly a happy couple, but Peter says they don’t have a “Hallmark greeting-card marriage” – which means an average year roughly 
works out to “300 good days, 
50 fabulous days and 15 shockers”. Lately, though, their numbers are looking up – and ditching the alcohol l has made all the difference, he explains in a revealing and frank interview in The Australian Women’s Weekly.

They talk openly about falling in love, their decision to marry and the challenges of competing high-profile careers. The couple, who have three kids – Jake, 23, Louis, 21 and Billi, 19 – invited The Weekly into their beautiful home for our December cover story.

Peter with he and Lisa’s three kids. Source: Instagram.

PETER’S TOP WEIGHT-LOSS TIPS FROM HIS BOOK

1 It really is about the sugar. If you cut the sugar from what you put in your mouth, then just about everything else will sort itself out.

2 In terms of losing weight, 80 per cent of it is to do with what you eat, and just 20 per cent the exercise you do.

3 Your claims that the reason you are overweight because you have a slow metabolism are nonsense.

4 All notions that you can remove flab on a particular part of the body by working on the muscles near and around that part are complete nonsense.

5 We all under-estimate what we eat. Study after study shows that if you keep a food diary for a few weeks, you will be reasonably good at estimating what you actually shovelled down your throat that day.

6 Diets don’t work. Or at least they just about never work. I repeat: don’t go ON a diet, CHANGE your diet.

Read our full interview with Lisa Wilkinson and Peter FitzSimons, in the December issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, on sale Thursday, October 27.

VIDEO: Lisa Wilkinson talks about her cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly on TODAY**

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