Nadiya Hussain once suffered a panic attack when she was sent the wrong herb in online food shop.
The ‘Great British Bake Off’ winner has opened up on how her life is affected by the anxiety triggered episodes and over a year ago she had a bad attack after she received parsley instead of coriander in a delivery.
Speaking to Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford on ‘This Morning’, she said: "Yeah it’s something that I don’t think is ever gonna go away. Sometimes, for example, I had a food shop come in about a year-and-a-half ago, and this is something I always remember and I ordered coriander and they gave me parsley. That was it. I had a panic attack just, it was bubbling away all day, then it just rose to the surface and I said, ‘Move the kids away, I can’t have them see me like this.’
"It feels breathless and it feels like you’re going to die – it sounds so dramatic but it’s not but that’s exactly the feeling you get. For me its patterns, so if I’m used to doing something a certain way and somebody says you have to do this a little bit different, I don’t know if it’s something that will ever go away. I haven’t had treatment for it, I use my baking and my writing as therapy and expression. I can just stop and think ‘I can do a little bit of writing’."
Nadiya, 34, is releasing her second novel ‘The Fall and Rise of the Amir Sisters’, which is a follow up to her first fiction book about faith, family and the sisterhood between four siblings.
Nadiya – who has three sisters and two brothers – has written about sex in her latest tome and she admits the racier parts mean that she can’t let her mother read the book.
The TV cook – whose family are Muslim – said: "The mum in the book talks about sex quite a lot and, I’m even saying the say the word and I’m thinking I can hear my mum, she would be rolling her eyes, I can feel her eyes rolling already because we don’t even say that word round her, so for her, I could never give her the book to read. My kids have read it. My boys are 10 and 11 – they think it’s great. If they can pick it up and read it – it’s such an easy read.
"I put taboo subjects in there – it doesn’t matter what culture you’re from – it’s something people don’t want to talk about so where I’ve got the dynamic of four sisters, I can go anywhere with it. These lives are in your hands, there’s something really powerful writing characters like that. Fertility is something so lighthearted and serious at the same time."
Nadiya Hussain had a parsley induced panic attack
