Reverend Richard Coles shares surprising health update: ‘I’ve started taking Ozempic’
By Lauren Taylor
Reverend Richard Coles has revealed that he’s started taking a weight-loss drug in a bid to lose two stone.
“My birthday present to myself was Ozempic, because I’m too fat and I want to lose some weight – it’s affecting my health I think,” says the broadcaster, author and famous vicar, who first rose to fame as part of the band The Communards in the 1980s.
“I could do it the regular way but realistically if I’m very busy I need all the help I can get!”
Coles, who was a Church of England vicar before stepping down in 2022 and made it to ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! 2024 final alongside winner Danny Jones and Coleen Rooney, says so far (two days in when we speak), it seems to be working.
“My stomach feels a bit different, not unpleasantly, weirdly low in appetite. It seems to be diminished.
“I just don’t want to get dependent on something just to keep health-threatening weight off. I want to get down to a reasonable weight and then maintain it without the assistance of pharmacy. I want to lose two stone,” the 63-year-old says.
“I’d love to tell you that I take to the hills, with a bounce in my stride and I cycle for 150 miles a week, but I don’t.”
Coles is the new host of the second series of The Apple and The Tree, a podcast in which he speaks to famous faces and their adult children, facilitating candid and moving discussions about topics we often avoid with our parents. Guests in this series include broadcaster Vanessa Feltz and her daughter Saskia, politician Michael Gove and his son William, and Sunday Brunch’s Simon Rimmer and his daughter Flo.
“It’s children understanding that their parents are not omnipotent deities, but frail humans like they are, and parents understanding that children need to live their own lives too, separate from the lives their parents want for them.
“I’ve spent a lot of my working life trying to get people to have conversations that they want to have, but they know how to have,” he muses. “Both my parents have died, and I spent quite a chunk of my conscious existence thinking, ‘I wish I’d had that conversation with them’.”
Born and bred in Kettering, Northamptonshire, Coles’ mother, Elizabeth, died in February 2024 and his father Nigel in 2018. “I was very close to my mum, and she was not a person who had ever been described as reticent, she was forthcoming and funny.
“My father was very introspective. Quite a lot was said without being spoken. I knew my father loved me and he knew I loved him. He would actually say it as he got to the end of his life, in a very English, embarrassing, coughing, sort of way.
“I got my father’s introspection and my mother’s drive, which is an interesting combination.”
Coles notes that he’s “sort of become a specialist in grief” through his work with the church, but also because he’s had a lot of loss in his own life.
His husband, who he was with for 12 years, Rev David Coles, died in 2019 after a long battle with alcoholism. “I thought I was pretty good at [helping people through their grief] until I was bereaved myself, and I realised I hadn’t really understood how when you are bereaved, you get mad, and also it’s exhausting because it’s such a slog.”
Being the partner of an alcoholic, Coles says, was “I think the hardest thing I’ve ever had to try to cope with” but through sharing his experience he has tried to connect to others in the same position.
“Some of us have been quietly enduring this shame, and it’s not something that is often shared, and it needn’t be like that – I don’t think shame needs any compounding at all.”
Alcoholism is, still, quite misunderstood. “I think we need to not see that person simply as a function of addiction. They’re a whole person, and they have attributes and characteristics of nuances and complexity.”
Coles stayed with David until his death, but says: “I would never judge someone who bailed out, sometimes it’s just impossible and you have to bail out for your own survival, or your kids.”
Does he see himself as a strong person? “No, not particularly,” he ponders. “I’ve taken some flack in my time and I have some bruises and scars, but then that’s life, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want a life where I feel that I hadn’t risked anything just to save myself from a scar.
“There are lots of things I’ve done which I wish I hadn’t done, but the sum total is of a life that is lived as fully as possible.”
If Coles wasn’t already a national treasure, he cemented his ‘everyone’s favourite vicar’ status on last year’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! –”I went in expecting a bromance, and I got one with a 25-year-old lesbian influencer [GK Barry].
“I slept better than I think I’d ever slept. You’d think sleeping in a hammock in the jungle would not give you a good night’s sleep but I slept like a baby. I think there might be something quite primitive within us that remembers what it was like to sleep around a campfire and be surrounded by nature.”
With plenty of other appearances under his belt, including QI, Have I Got News For You? Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity MasterChef and Would I Lie To You? being himself on TV comes naturally, but self acceptance has been “a life’s work”, he says.
“The nice thing is that you stop thinking you’re in competition with people, and you just accept the realities of yourself and the realities of them, I think maybe people respond to that.
“I have always tried very hard to deny inconvenient realities about myself, but can’t be ar*ed with that anymore.
Coming out, he says, helped that click too. “I grew up in a world which was hostile [towards gay people] and then when I was 16 I came out to the surprise of absolutely no one,” he laughs.
“And I think it was very good for me. It made me realise that there are certain ‘givens’ about people and you just have to accept them.”
The Apple and The Tree is available on all podcast providers.