Jackie O opens up about food issues in new book: ‘A jar of Nutella for dinner’

Jackie O reveals her secret battle with alcohol and drug addiction in her new memoir – but she also opens up about her past food issues.

Radio veteran Jackie O reveals her secret battle with alcohol and drug addiction in her newly-released memoir – but she also opens up about her past food issues.

In The Whole Truth, out today, Jackie reveals she’s had lifelong “issues” with food, beginning in childhood when she would set her alarm from 5am to get up and eat slices of white bread with “butter and cinnamon sugar” before the rest of her family woke up for the day.

She also claims her ex-husband Lee Henderson focused on her weight, once suggesting she get a full body scan, “because he thought I was obese”.

While the scan determined she wasn’t obese, Jackie writes that she was overweight at the time, as she was comfort eating and drinking several glasses of wine each night.

Her go-to foods were “hamburgers, hot chips and pizza,” but she also craved sweets. She writes that one night, her husband busted her eating a truly bizarre dinner: An entire jar of Nutella washed down with a glass of champagne.

Jackie O at the 2022 ACRAs …

… and a year later at the 2023 awards. Picture: Supplied/CRA

The recommended serving size for Nutella – two tablespoons – is around 200 calories.

Later on in the book, Jackie opens up about her headline-making weight loss in recent years. She writes that while rumours abounded that she had resorted to everything from gastric bypass surgery to weight loss drug Ozempic to slim down, in fact, the transformation was due to a cleaner, healthier lifestyle after going to rehab for her drug and alcohol issues.

She said that with that drastic change in her daily habits, she quickly lost about 10 kgs.

“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 wrote.

Elsewhere in The Whole Truth, Jackie O reflects on the most infamous on-air stunts she and co-host Kyle Sandilands concocted over the years, confessing that the show’s rising ratings success often came “at the detriment of my own morals and values.”

Jackie O last week went public with the drug and alcohol addiction that sent her to rehab. Picture: Wendell Teodoro/Getty

In an emotional segment on The Kyle and Jackie O Show last week, the radio star read out a chapter from her book detailing her secret drug addiction.

Jackie said she was “badly addicted” to lots of different things, including painkillers, sleeping pills and alcohol.

“I was averaging about 24 Panadeine Forte painkillers a day and then I was averaging about 10 to 12 Stilnox [sleeping tablets] a day,” she revealed.

“Someone was watching over me because I don’t know how I woke up most days with that kind of dosage.”