Living Without Regret

She’s a cookbook writer, publisher, businesswoman, wife and mother, and now a competitor on Dancing with the Stars. So how does she do it? Nadia Lim talks to Emma Clifton about her “crazy” life and why she channels her 80-year-old self for advice.

- Emma Clifton

Carlos, how would you describe going from having one child to two?” Nadia Lim repeats the question I’ve just asked her to Carlos Bagrie, her husband of seven years, as he frantically drops off some emergency buttermilk. “Difficult,” he responds immediately, before he disappears back into the home office with a smile.

The buttermilk is emergency buttermilk because Nadia is doing recipe testing the morning of our interview, in the brief window she has before she is due down the road to begin the first of her two daily Dancing with the Stars rehearsals. So she is trialling the third round of banana, courgette and chocolate pikelets for her new cookbook at the same time she talks all things Dancing for The Australian Women’s Weekly.

We are tucked into the cosy kitchen at the couple’s Auckland home, and I am lucky not only to be eating freshly made pikelets during our chat, but also to be holding Nadia’s six-month-old baby River, round-cheeked and sleepy, recently roused from his morning nap. But don’t let this very calm picture of suburban life fool you: every day is scheduled within an inch of its life, Nadia says cheerfully. “We thought we were busy with the first one but now… it takes it to a whole new level. Literally every waking moment, they [her young sons] are involved somehow. I would be lucky to get maybe 15 minutes, at about 9pm, to do something that’s not child or work related. And that doesn’t happen often – it might happen a few times a week.” She laughs. “It’s pretty crazy – but I wouldn’t change it for anything.”