"I REALISED THAT IF I COULD BE THE ARTIST OF MY OWN BODY AND BE SO MOTIVATED ABOUT ONE THING, I COULD PUT THE SAME EFFORT INTO EVERYTHING ELSE"

TV personality Davide Sanclimenti on overcoming body image issues, finding balance with his fitness, and breaking the news to his Italian mother that he was going to need to cut back on the pasta portions...

Having won 2022’s edition of Love Island, clocking up a hefty 1.6 million Instagram followers in the process, you could forgive Davide Sanclimenti for taking his foot off the gas as 2024 gets underway. But before finding fame – and love – on the ITV2 show, Sanclimenti’s original passion was fitness. A qualified personal trainer and entrepreneur, with degrees in economics and finance, he’s now become the brand champion of nutritional brand SCI-MX, to promote the importance of well-balanced supplements that place quality of ingredients front and centre.

Sanclimenti’s journey to becoming one of the UK’s most renowned fitness fanatics didn’t start easily. As he wrote on Instagram at the end of 2023, his focus on fitness started after a period of body shaming, which he suffered as a child growing up in Italy.

‘I was body shamed in school,’ he wrote. ‘I was classed as overweight as a teenager, so I started training. Running like I was in a marathon and swimming like an Olympian. I was eating almost nothing, until I lost an unhealthy amount of weight.’

“When you’re teenagers, if guys are going to make a joke about your body, they don’t keep it back,” says Sanclimenti when we speak over Zoom. “That happened a lot. I remember a friend who was like, ‘You will never have abs because you’ve got a belly.’ Many jokes like that, and they affected me back then.”