Look at the average American diet: ice cream butter cheese whole milk all this fat. People don't realize how much of this stuff you get by the end of the day. High blood pressure is from all this high-fat eating.

In L.A. I get a meal delivery service called Diet Designs. I like a nice butter lettuce salad with some avocado fresh grapefruit shredded chicken breast and raw almond slices with a sesame vinaigrette dressing. I also love juicing and am kind of obsessed with it.

But if you pick up every other magazine it is the peanut butter diet or the cabbage soup diet and then you go to the radio and you hear that you can drink some solution and you will lose weight overnight. It just does not work that way!

As for those grapefruit and buttermilk diets I'll take roast chicken and dumplings.

Do you know how many calories are in butter and cheese and ice cream? Would you get your dog up in the morning for a cup of coffee and a donut?

I've always been a bit of a decorator. I think if I wasn't a singer I'd probably be in stage setting or interior design or something. I like clutter and I'm quite visually greedy. I can't have things to be plain I have to have things looking interesting... maybe I'm just a frustrated interior designer stuck in a singing career.

About half my designs are controlled fantasy 15 percent are total madness and the rest are bread-and-butter designs.

My dad Donald was a vet and had a practice in Yorkshire. Cats and dogs were his bread and butter but his greatest love was large animals.

I didn't have any role models really. My best friend was a dog. My mum and dad saved a dog from the gutter and that dog was my brother before Jesse was born. Sami was his name and he was my role model.

The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.