Nick Frost: I don’t have a weight loss target – my goal is just to stay alive

“It just feels great,” he says when we meet in a south-west London cafe overrun by yummy mummies' mega prams. Such a rapid overhaul did throw a spanner in the works a couple of weeks ago, however, when – due to appear on the One Show – the 51-year-old realised he had nothing to wear. In the end, after a lot of digging, a decade-old suit was found, “and it just fit perfectly,” he smiles. “My girlfriend's like, Why don't you be brave and throw everything away? And I think I might.”

It's a nerve-racking prospect. Yet Frost, who has starred in cult hits including Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz with his close friend Simon Pegg, has no intention of returning to his old eating habits. Having struggled with bingeing since childhood, stowing away in the car or the cupboard under the stairs to eat handfuls of iced buns or Wispas in secret, it is only since his birthday in March that this life-altering shift has taken place.

Increasingly aware that “big old fat men in their fifties don't really become 60”, and that if he continued “eating myself to death” he wouldn't be around to see his two-year-old daughter one day wed, he has cut out bingeing completely – food being the last addiction, he says, in a series that have plagued his adult life. His new regime doesn't involve meal plans or calorie counting but, as he told one fan seeking advice on Instagram lately, to simply “stop eating s--t”.

Frost grew up in a “fairly traumatic” home, where his mother grappled with alcohol abuse, and his father, broken by the failure of the family furniture business, never worked again. He left school at 16 and attempted suicide a year later, habitually overdoing the drink and drugs even at the height of his Hollywood career as he barrelled towards “self-destruction”.

Frost stopped drinking five years ago, and the drug binges are gone (in recent years he has been diagnosed with ADHD, OCD and PTSD). Still food addiction remained, he says, having convinced himself that, after dispensing with the others, things would be okay if he kept just this one. “But the fact is, it just wouldn't have been at all.”

Food has been harder than the others to kick, in fact, “because look, it's everywhere,” he says, motioning around the cafe, which does a special line in soft-serve ice cream.

It should be considered equally harmful to substance abuse, he thinks, because “it's more prevalent than drug use, and it's somehow seen as all right in society: he's just a bit fat, or he needs to lose weight, or he's got a sweet tooth,” Frost says of the excuses we afford our excess consumption, his own sometimes including an additional 6,000 calories a day. “We do lots of things to try and validate the way people eat. I think it's easier to use as a mood regulator than crack, and more readily available.”

The “evil” part of his relationship with eating aside, Frost loves food. He worked as a chef for eight years in Chiquito's Mexican restaurant (where he met Simon Pegg), and gladly spends hours each day dishing up beef stroganoff and homemade focaccia, chicken paprika and fish pie for his brood (he has a 12-year-old son from his first marriage, and a five-year-old and two-year-old with his current partner). He has solo-dined at Noma, become starstruck on meeting Angela Hartnett, and makes his kids sniff tomatoes at the grocers' so they know what quality produce smells like: food “is at the forefront of our relationship as a family”.

So much so that those family favourites are recorded in A Slice of Fried Gold, his first cookbook (its title taken from his cult Spaced catchphrase). “I may not know the difference between a sous vide and a Su Pollard,” he writes, “but I can slice a mushroom faster than any m-----f-----.”

Frost is warm and affable, prone to expletives (mostly beginning with F, but he does not discriminate), and happier out of the spotlight that has seen him on the red carpet with co-stars including Sigourney Weaver, Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh and Rosamund Pike, than in it. On the day we meet he accessorises a grey tracksuit with his trademark thick gold chains, and a Tesco bag – though this is less a style choice than the ingredients required for that night's dish of honey barbecued chicken.

The time he puts into each meal is one of many marked differences from his own upbringing. “As a child, it was often fairly tempestuous to be in the house,” he reflects, “and the only time that changed was when everyone was sober, and people were cooking, and eating.” The rest of the time, food was his emotional crutch: eating secretly a habit that allowed him to feel like “James Bond”.

There was a thrill in going incognito, Frost remembers, waiting until his parents would fall asleep in the front room, creeping into the kitchen and cloaking his hand in a tea towel to mask any rustling before making off with a fistful of digestives. “There's the thought that this could go really badly wrong, but I'm kind of enjoying it while it hasn't. And then it doesn't. And you f------ did it, you know? That feeling you get from digestives is the same feeling you get from any drug. It's that drive that pushes you to do something again and again.”

By his late teens, Frost weighed 20 stone. At 18, he spent two years in Israel and Palestine while living on a kibbutz, “and I was in for a big f------- shock, because it was the healthiest food a human could ever eat”. So he didn't, dropping nine stone by the time he returned.

“Even now, trying to voice it just feels so intensely private, in terms of shame.”

Nick Frost

Coming home pushed things back to the other extreme. Frost was working in restaurants, drinking 10 pints (“how many calories is that? Two thousand?”) on nights out, followed by a double burger on his way back. The idea of weight loss could not have been further from his mind – “I didn't eat vegetables until I was like, 30” – and the worse things got, the harder it was to discuss with anyone, let alone address. “Even now, trying to voice it just feels so intensely private, in terms of shame,” he says. By the time of his birthday this year, the largest he'd ever been, “I could literally feel like I was going to die at any minute.”

Frost would rather not print what the scales read six months ago, but it's a significant figure. He doesn't have a weight loss target in mind – the goal instead being to “stay alive” – but it is not only towards his diet that his attitude is shifting. An avowed non-exerciser, he is set to begin a weights programme at his friend's gym next week.

Being “realistic” is his strategy going forward, he says. Frost has no interest in so-called fast fixes, particularly after trying a diet 10 years ago that involved eating 600 calories a day via “one weird disc of something in the morning, then the cube of something and then a 'refreshing' broth. For someone who likes food, it couldn't have been worse.” As such he is equally nonplussed by weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, not least because it is “really expensive”. Besides, his method appears to be working.