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In the past couple of years, Davina McCall has battled two significant health scares – undergoing an operation to remove a benign brain tumour in 2024, after having surgery for breast cancer the previous year. Yet the unstoppable TV host, whose career spans from presenting Channel Four's debut series of Big Brother a quarter of a century ago to the current smash hit The Masked Singer, has experienced a turbulent journey with her wellbeing.

During her fifties, she emerged as a fitness guru, creating her own wellness platform, Own Your Goals Davina, alongside a collection of sugar-free recipe books and exercise DVDs. However, this marked a remarkable transformation from the "downward spiral" that began during her teenage years and intensified in her early twenties, when her party lifestyle descended into a perilous addiction to heroin.

This week, chatting to husband Michael Douglas on their joint podcast Making The Cut, she disclosed how the pressure of presenting high-stakes live television programmes like Big Brother may have also taken its toll on her health.

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"I know you've always said something about your thyroid," Michael remarked. "You think you might have damaged your thyroid with your work, being so anxious permanently about being on live telly, it might have damaged you."

Davina concurred, explaining that her "imposter syndrome" had consistently left her feeling inadequate – whilst her difficult relationship with troubled mother Florence had led to a distressing childhood that had, partly, driven her towards heroin dependency. Speaking on ITV's This Morning, Davina revealed she had been "trying to fill a hole, a void" through drug use.

After dabbling with cannabis and cocaine during her teenage years, Davina first tried heroin aged 15, describing the experience as "like coming home."

She remembered: "When you are on it, nothing else matters, so you don't care about meeting someone on time or picking up your kids from school."

"Heroin became my best friend," she continued. "It's like the biggest, warmest, softest cuddle."

However, since leaving drugs behind, the most potent substance the TV host now takes is HRT. Just before her shocking brain tumour diagnosis, the Masked Singer star shared a video on social media demonstrating her daily HRT routine to shed light on the menopause: "A big part of my morning routine is hormones, and I thought to demystify it a little bit, I would show you how to apply it," Davina explained in the footage.

"In the interest of transparency I have hypothyroidism. So this is thyroxin, and I take 100 micrograms of that a day."

She went on: "This is my hormone sticker – and this is my horn tattoo! [The HRT sticker] does leave a little bit of sticky stuff but I thought you should see the ups and downs. I want you to see warts and all.

"When I put on a new sticker, I put it on the other side. We use stickers because they are transdermal, transdermal is important because it's a much better way to take HRT."

Alongside the HRT patch, which Davina applied to her hip, she boosted her hormone levels with an oestrogen transdermal gel rubbed onto her arm. This was complemented by a testosterone-containing cream: "Testosterone does not make you grow a penis, or testicles or get hair or anything like that," she quipped. "I am just replenishing my levels to where they should be."

It was during this period of navigating the menopause that Davina claims she achieved the peak physical condition of her entire life: "In my 20s, exercise wasn't as much of a focus for me as it is now. I was quite slim but my body wasn't very toned, which was probably because when I did go to the gym."

"I would never really break a sweat," she explained. "You would typically find me on the stepping machine reading a magazine."

She remembered being utterly shocked to discover that, despite maintaining a slender figure, her cholesterol levels were elevated: "Comparing my fitness now to back in my 20s, I am so much fitter than I was then. At the time, I was quite content with my fitness, but if I was to have done a fitness test at 28, I'm sure I wouldn't have scored as well as I would now, despite being in my 50s."