AS SHE GEARS UP FOR 'DANCING ON ICE' ADELE ROBERTS ON HOW CANCER HELPED HER LOVE HER BODY AND FIND HER INNER STRENGTH

'It's like having cancer ignited something in me that made me become the person I always should have been'

- BELINDA ROBEY

Ask DJ and soon-to-be Dancing on Ice contestant Adele Roberts to sum up 2023, and her reply is succinct and perhaps a little surprising.

"The best year of my life," the 44-year-old tells HELLO!, in her first interview since it was revealed she would be taking part in the popular ITV show, paired with experienced professional skater Mark Hanretty.

"It's the year that I've become most connected to myself, most appreciative of life and one where I can't wait for the future - and I never used to feel like that," says the former BBC Radio 1 presenter, who continues her recovery from treatment for bowel cancer, with which she was diagnosed in October 2021, "I used to be so down on myself; so negative. I spent so many years trapped in this cycle of hatred for my body. But it's like, with the cancer came a release. I think of it now as symbolic of the sadness I used to feel; it was a shackle on me and once it was cut out of me, I was free. Now I'm able to see my body for what it is beautiful and amazing."

A RECORD-BREAKER

It's the body that, in April, helped Adele set a new Guinness World Record at the London Marathon as the fastest woman with a stoma (an opening in the abdomen that allows waste to pass safely from the body into a bag) to complete the 26-mile fundraising event.

She achieved this less than a year after finishing gruelling chemotherapy following life-saving surgery, in a time of three hours, 30 mins and 22 seconds.

"That's faster than the personal best I'd set before my diagnosis," Adele, an experienced runner, tells us proudly.

Audrey, as she named her stoma, even had her own runner's number.