Andrea McLean announces she is leaving Loose Women
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Andrea McLean, 52, has admitted she still feels “lost” sometimes, two years on from quitting ITV’s Loose Women. The star suffered a “really rough year” where her desperation to be perfect led her to have a nervous breakdown, and she decided to invest her time in her business, This Girl Is on Fire.
“I know how it feels to feel stuck, scared, burnt out and overwhelmed,” she said.
“I’m a capable woman, I’m really good at what I do but I don’t know, I feel lost, I feel like I’ve kind of lost my direction.”
“I’ve always been brave but I kind of lost it for a while because of various circumstances in my life and relationships that I’ve been in, and people in my life made me feel not brave,” she added to The Mirror.
Andrea announced she was quitting Loose Women back in December 2020, explaining she wanted to focus on her mental health and spending time with her husband and children.
She called the move the “bravest” thing she could ever have done, especially in her 50s.
The star also channelled her energy into her mindset membership app, This Girl Is on Fire, which she has since turned into a book.
She had previously suffered a nervous breakdown back in 2019, after battling to be the “perfect mother and wife”.
And when she left Loose Women, Andrea battled money worries as she immediately lost all her brand deals.
Speaking to Johnny Seifert on the Secure The Insecure podcast, she explained: “When I made the announcement I was leaving TV to follow my heart and dreams, go all-in on This Girl Is on Fire, obviously we put a lot of planning into this moment because obviously, it’s a huge jump.
“I was the breadwinner, and this was the job that was paying the bills, but everyone in TV does jobs as well.
“On the day that I announced I was leaving, every brand dropped me… so I went from, ‘OK I knew I had this amount of money coming in and this much work that will see me through the next six to eight months’ – it disappeared overnight.
“That’s how big a deal moving away from TV is, it was financially like a punch in the stomach, my safety net was gone.
“I was like ‘Oh my god, I only have my savings. I can’t turn back and change my mind, I have no other income.’
“Nobody cares about you. They care about what you represent, and I had just stepped away from a high profile job.”
In an interview with Express.co.uk, Andrea explained that she and her husband of seven years, Nick Feeney, decided to sell the family home they shared with their two children, Finlay, 20, and Amy, 15.
They needed the money to invest in This Girl Is on Fire, and didn’t like the idea of seeking out investors.
Andrea admitted she was “sad” to leave behind her beloved garden which she had spent copious amounts of time nurturing, and move into a rented home.
“It’s not like I’ve sold it and that’s it. I’ve invested it in me and my business which I really believe in. And what’s great, we did it before it became a problem,” she said.
“It wasn’t in a desperate move. We didn’t say, ‘Oh my god, we need to sell tomorrow. The whole world is ending.’
“It wasn’t like that, it was actually quite calm.”
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