The ever green goddess

Diana Moran has long personified how regular exercise can benefit your body and mind. And now, through TV’s BBC Breakfast, The Green Goddess continues to show us all how to keep active. Diana speaks to Rachel Banham.

- Rachel Banham

It’s a saying that Diana Moran admits that she loves, and she uses it frequently: “Age is mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter!” At almost 81, Diana is the perfect example of her mantra.

She has been self-isolating for seven weeks at the time of her interview with Let’s Talk, but she continues to keep active and three days a week on BBC Breakfast she has been inspiring TV viewers across the country to do the same. More than 73,000 subscribers have so far signed up to receive Diana’s daily online bulletin through her website: www.getready4anyage.com

Explaining her recent return to the breakfast programme, where she showed millions how to exercise in the 1980s, she says: “It’s been a bit surreal actually. At the very beginning, it came about by mistake.”

She explains how the programme contacted her to ask how she was coping self-isolating. She did a Skype interview and was asked if she still exercised, so she demonstrated what she does.

Diana says: “They said, ‘Could you do that again for us tomorrow and show us another exercise?’ And I did another one on Skype and then they said, ‘We’d like you to do that regularly’.

“So then I set up my little studio in my conservatory. And I’ve been doing them ever since.”

She adds: “I’m very simple in all my stuff that I do for fitness. I don’t have huge routines and I don’t have equipment. It’s regular moderate exercise and a moderate way of eating as well.