January has become a month of mass puritanism. You cut out meat and dairy if you’re doing Veganuary. You lay off the booze if you’re doing Dry January. We regret the platefuls of roast potatoes, the tubs of chocolates and the vats of Baileys that sustained us through December, and spend our cash on self-flagellating, hopeful quick-fixes that promise to make us better, more focused, less prone to bad habits.
This reaches fever pitch when it comes to food and fitness. A glance at the Amazon bestseller list takes the pulse of the nation and suggests that we’re flailing around for a solution: of the top 10 books across all genres, seven are about eating, and six of those are about getting thinner.
Although it’s still hugely popular, there has been a considerable and growing backlash against the most evangelical of food trends, “clean eating”, which, in its terror of bread and pasta, has built an industry around drinking kale juice and pretending that courgettes are the same as spaghetti. So now, food writers and fitness gurus have lopped off the “C” – it’s all about getting lean and staying lean.
Joe Wicks, a 31-year-old, puppyish former personal trainer who looks like Jon Snow would if he left Game of Thrones and spent the summer as an Ibiza club rep, has become the suddenly famous face of this move towards litheness. Known to his millions of fans and followers as the Body Coach, he’s the bouncy, excitable, ridiculously sculpted figurehead of Lean in 15: exercising quickly and cooking at home so you can balance the kind of food you’re eating with your activity levels.
His plan lent itself to three books in 2016, each of which went to No 1 in the same year, a feat no other non-fiction writer – not Jamie, not Delia, not Nigella – has managed to pull off. Right now they occupy the top three slots on Amazon. Wicks is on the cover of each, in skintight, bright-coloured lycra, showing off his lean physique, holding a burger, making a stir fry, and eating some – hang on, is that pasta?
“The whole clean-eating thing, I don’t even understand it! I’ve just had bangers and mash, don’t mean I’m dirty,” he shrugs, having just chomped down his sizable lunch. He’s in Newcastle today on the second date of a UK-wide tour to promote his new DVD, in which he wears more skintight, bright-coloured lycra and shows you how to do some of his favourite HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training, which basically means doing rapid bursts of full-on muscle-mashing exercise followed by short periods of rest) moves on a tropical beach. Fizzy on screen, he’s surprisingly serious in person, wearing round Hockney specs that suggest he means business.
In 2014, Wicks was a personal trainer with a decent-ish following on Instagram, earning, he says, “a grand a month”. Eighteen months on, he has got the books (the three so far are part of an eight-book deal, and have sold more than 1m copies), the DVD, a Channel 4 series and an ever-extending network of social media platforms that he constantly updates with recipe clips, selfies and “graduate reports”, with before-and-after shots from followers of his subscription-based 90-Day SSS Plan. He has even cultivated his own language. Scales are “the sad step”. Broccoli is “midget trees”. His Instagram recipes are brief clips of him slopping ingredients into a pan with the kind of zingy enthusiasm that makes Jamie Oliver look like Gary Barlow. He talks of his success in evangelical terms, with a sprinkling of cosmic balance. “My aim is always just to get one person a day to exercise and cook healthy food. Of course, all that love and content I put out has come back, in the form of people buying the book. It comes round like that.”
Wicks was born in Epsom, Surrey, and grew up on a council estate. “If you had met me as a kid you would have never predicted me to be a success. I had a pretty ropey upbringing and you might have thought I’d have gone the other way,” he says. His parents split up when he was young; he stayed with his mum until he went to study sports science at university, when he moved in with his dad, a roofer. He says his mum “didn’t have a clue about nutrition” when he and his two brothers were kids. “Our cupboards were always full of chocolate, midget gems and Wagon Wheels. She’d only ever cook one thing, which was lasagne, because she never got educated in cooking. We’d have pasta in tomato sauce or she’d say: ‘Want a picnic?’ and we’d have sandwiches. So I pretty much lived off junk food until I was 16, 17.” He understands now why it was like that. “It’s a financial thing, isn’t it? We couldn’t afford steak and fish every night and my mum wouldn’t know how to cook it even if she got given it. So she kept it simple.”
Although it would be nice for the story to imagine schoolboy Wicks as an overweight, McDonald’s-addicted Mega-Drive lover who had some sort of epiphany that transformed him into abs and sinew, the truth is that he was always active, always sporty, always thin. “Like, really skinny,” he says. “My mum’s really slim. I never really had an overweight body.” He says he struggled academically at school. He says he was “a bit silly, a bit of a troublemaker” when he was younger. “I was quite hyperactive as a young kid, and then when I got to high school I was just the class clown. I didn’t have much of an attention span.” He found salvation in PE, so much so that he trained to be a PE teacher after his degree. But a short spell as a teaching assistant showed him that this was not the job for him. “I was at a rough school, and the kids were really hard work. I just thought, I don’t think I’ve got it in me. And I love kids and that, but they were quite young, and pulling my hair and kicking my shins.” Eventually, he decided to stick to what he loved, and became a personal trainer.
There’s a kind of “never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this” narrative to Wicks’ tale, one he is keen to emphasise. He says he only started the Instagram to get more customers, and he only started recipe and diet plans in the hope that if he sold 10 a month, he could do less training, and have an extra morning in bed. It’s true that there’s something unusual about the stratospheric success he has enjoyed. By his own admission, what he’s saying isn’t particularly new or revelatory. It’s all a spin on some basic truths. Don’t eat so many processed foods, do more exercise. If you’re more active, you can eat more than if you sit on your backside all day.
The fact that it’s Wicks who is topping the charts with this rather than any other one-time trainer suggests that he’s either very, very lucky, or some kind of machiavellian business genius. The truth is somewhere between the two – he’s saying the right thing, at the right time. “I don’t see myself as an entrepreneur. I just had an idea,” he says. “The Instagram was an idea. You have to think back two years ago and I had 5,000 followers or whatever. You’re not getting paid, there’s no money in it, you can’t monetise this right now. But the book deal came off the back of that. The reason I think it’s been so successful is that people do it, they love it and feel better about themselves. You’re not starving yourself. You can still eat burgers and make curries and have nice bagels and baguettes and things. If you do exercise, you can eat this food.”
There is also the matter of his looks, which have helped usher in a kind of fame that he’s particularly squeamish about. He’s starting to become a Daily Mail regular; there has been much speculation about who his new girlfriend might be. In November, Wicks appeared on Good Morning Britain, where he was repeatedly asked whether he was single or not by Piers Morgan. Wicks visibly squirmed. “He just grilled me, didn’t he? I wasn’t ready for it,” he says. “I like keeping my relationship private, really. It’s the one thing I don’t want on social media.” Last year he broke up with his long-term girlfriend, and even she had never appeared on his many public platforms. “It’s always been like that. I was with a girl for 11 years and you would have never known. She was never on my social media. I don’t wanna be like one of those celebrities in the papers having photoshoots and all that.” He might not have much choice. “But I’ll try for as long as I can.”
Wicks knows he’s good-looking, and that it helps. “But it’s a bit annoying when I turn up to photoshoots and they always want me to be topless,” he says. “I’m over that now, I feel like I’ve got credibility. I wanna wear a nice smart suit and do the front cover of GQ and Esquire mag and talk about my business and my mission.” In the early days, he says he would do anything he was asked. “Turn up with broccoli, hang out of a tree. There is that level of, you’re successful because you’re good-looking and that, but that’s not how my brain thinks. I always think, well, do I have to do it topless?”
Hang on, haven’t you got your top off in your new book? “Oh, in the third book, yeah,” he grins. “Me and my publisher talked about this. We’d never done it in the first two books and we were like, it’s the third one, it’s aspirational, let’s stick a little selfie in there.” He gets his abs out for the DVD, too, he admits sheepishly. “The last one I did topless because it’s the ‘winners’ workout’. So I rip the mic off and pull my top off and run in the sea. Hopefully people will think, I’ll do the last one so I can see him topless. Get ’em on their last workout!”
Wicks knows how to give ’em what they want; he has been canny enough to see that pushing his books and regimes as anti-diet has added to their appeal. “Don’t talk to me about the D word!” he yelps on his Channel 4 show, The Body Coach. “All diets are based on deprivation and dropping calories,” he says now, firmly. “People are so confused.” All he has done is clear it up: eat what you want so long as you’re doing the exercise to match it.
The thing is, it’s still a diet, isn’t it? Whether it’s the My Shape Plan diary at the front of his latest book, or the tailored 90-Day SSS Plan (a one-off payment of £147, to which Wicks says 135,000 people have subscribed), it’s following a regimented exercise and nutrition process that means you’re obsessed with and focusing on food. Wicks is adamant that no, it’s not a diet – it’s a way of rethinking your entire life. “A diet for me is cutting things out. We don’t cut anything out. All we’re saying is eat in moderation at the right time and you can eat a lot more. For me, 90 days is a good amount of time to change habits.”
Now, Wicks wants to change habits on a much bigger scale. “I want to get in with schools and the NHS. I don’t quite know in my head what that means yet. Something where I’m helping the population of this country, not just on social media, but, like whether it’s on TV, or within the government where I’m leading a campaign …” His enthusiasm is infectious. “We’re getting more and more unhealthy, we’re getting more diabetes and we’re getting more obese, so I feel like I could be the person that really leads that, you know? It is just education, isn’t it? If you can teach a family what they should be eating and what they should cut out, and change those habits, then the whole family becomes healthier.”
In the face of the clean-eating horrors of juice cleanses, swapping tea for “infused water” and the scientific twaddle around detox, Wicks’s Lean in 15 plan doesn’t seem like such a bad option, largely because it’s simple: it’s easy to grasp and nice to eat. So much so, in fact, that he almost starts to talk himself out of a job. “If you cut it all away, the plan, the books, everything, if you just do a workout in your living room and you cook your food at home, real food, that’s literally it,” he insists. But he’s only done three books, and he’s signed up for eight. Is that famous enthusiasm – there could not be a better advert for his plan’s supposed energy-boosting prospects – going to be sustainable? “I’m just buzzing for life. People are just drawn to that, aren’t they?” he says, ever the businessman. “If I change, people will think, nah, I don’t like him any more, I’ve gone off him.” Besides, he says, imagine if you were in his position. “My life’s completely changed. I own a house. I didn’t even think I’d have a mortgage. I come from a background where we didn’t have properties. None of my family went to university, we never had houses. Now I can do all these things I never thought possible. I’m having the best time ever!”
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