Jamie Oliver says cooking saved his life.
Jamie Oliver credits cooking with saving his life
The celebrity chef - who has children Poppy, 21, Daisy, 20, Petal, 14, Buddy, 12 and River, six, with wife Jools - struggled with dyslexia when he was growing up but said he knew he could always rely on cooking for a career.
He told The Sun newspaper: "Cooking genuinely saved my life. I would have been utterly miserable without it.
“Although school work was really hard, I was good at other stuff and that meant my mental health didn’t suffer.
“I knew there would always be a chef’s job for me and I would always be all right.”
Now, Jamie, 47 - who claims he didn't read a novel until he was 35 - has written a book 'Billy And The Giant Adventure'.
He said: "As a child I loved story time but I couldn’t read myself.
“I wasn’t lazy or stupid, I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t read a novel until I was 35.
“Cooking always came so naturally but writing and releasing a children’s book has been about celebrating everything I’ve struggled with.”
"I’ve always tried to put the kids to bed as often as possible and read to them.
“A few years ago it got to the stage where their reading was better than mine, so they asked me to make up a story from my head, which I did.
"In typical Jamie style, though, I’d forget where I was, so I started to record the stories on my phone.”