HAIRY Biker Dave Myers has described how ‘food became repellent’ during chemotherapy.

‘Martha’ wrote to the Hairy Bikers – Agony Uncles podcast about her battle with anorexia, leading to a conversation about having a healthy relationship with food.

Martha said: “When I was 17, I became extremely ill with anorexia. I’ll spare you most the details but I spent the following years cycling in and out of the hospital.

“I’m 26 now so it’s been 10 years since my initial diagnosis and my last stay in hospital ended in 2016.

“Although I’m really proud of how far I’ve come, my life is still severely restricted by my illness, I’m very underweight and I still limit my calories.

“I was hoping you could give me some advice on how I can change my mindsight, did your dieting period ever result in obsessive thoughts about calories?”

Barrow-born Dave said that he and co-star Si King were ‘two fat blokes who were getting really ill’ so it was a ‘completely different criteria’.

"Being best mates, we could slightly take the mickey out of each other and we had to retrain ourselves from being the big nob of buttercups on the telly,” said Dave.

He revealed that the pair had been approached to create a ‘Hairy Dieters’ book aimed at teenagers to which they ‘point blank’ refused.

He said: “We know how serious the subject matter is and we didn’t feel qualified or want to take the responsibility of maybe hurting people.”

The TV cook then went onto explain how chemotherapy affected his relationship with food.

He said: “It’s funny being somebody who has been greedy all my life, when I started chemotherapy I lost my appetite completely.

“Food became repellent.

“Once you (Si King) were round, Kingy, and you made me porridge and you put seeds in it, and I couldn’t eat it because the seeds were there. I’ve never had that mindset with food.

“I was being weighed every week, not to see my weight go up, it was to see how far it was dropping -and it was dropping.

“And whatever head state I was in, I found it so hard to get the food down me.

“Luckily with me it was a by-product of my treatment but for that short period, about a month, I kind of thought, this is just a relationship with food. It was physical as well as mental. God it was hard.

“You just need to get help really.”