SELF-PROCLAIMED former party animal Rita Simons has swapped wild nights out for decaf tea and is feeling fantastic as she nears 50.
The EastEnders and Hollyoaks star, 48, gave up booze a year ago, fed-up with craving red wine at home and the excess weight she simply couldn’t shift following her hysterectomy.
Supported by husband Ben Harlow, himself teetotal for more than two years, Rita doesn’t miss the wild nights getting trolleyed in London‘s bars and clubs.
And she’s loving the physical differences she’s seeing, from her slimmed down frame to her glowing, natural skin after getting her fillers dissolved.
Speaking exclusively to The Sun, she says: “From someone who drank every day, I don’t miss it. I don’t crave it. I don’t want it.
“And life is really so much better. You don’t realise how much masking alcohol does until you stop drinking. So it’s been amazing. We just drink decaf tea these days.”
Nowadays, she’s simply Rita, a married mum-of-two who’s embracing middle age and is on the hunt for gritty drama roles after quitting Hollyoaks in the summer.
But for a time, her lifestyle was interchangeable with her popular EastEnders character Roxy Mitchell.
“Back in the day, I was very much like Roxy,” she says, speaking on behalf of WhichBingo. “I was an animal.
“I was a party animal. And then as I got older, I was what you call middle lane drinking. It was the nice glass of red, walking around the house, making dinner at night.
“A couple of glasses of red, maybe a gin. Thinking, like so many of us do, that that’s just normal. I’m not getting drunk.
“I haven’t got hangover the next day. But then realising that, actually, if there was no wine in the house, I’d be a bit like, ‘I better go out and get a bottle of wine because there’s no wine’. And it was that.
“It was that that I was like, this can’t go anywhere good. So I just stopped.”
The initial struggle at cutting out the familiar warming hug of wine was made easier when the benefits started to present themselves.
“I’d say the first two weeks were quite difficult. But then what happens is you start feeling great and you start losing weight,” she says.
“And see, because I’ve had a hysterectomy and I put on some weight after the hysterectomy, which I couldn’t lose. That’s what kickstarted me to stop drinking. And the weight started falling off of me and I was like, ‘damn, it’s the wine’.
“And then the less I drunk, the better I felt. And then you kind of start to get addicted to feeling good. Now it’s just the norm.”
Rita credits her time living in Liverpool while working on Hollyoaks with “healing” her.
She’s spent two years in the city, calling it a “gorgeous” place, though is now looking to move back to London to be closer to family and old friends.
“I got there and, I wasn’t always drinking too much, I was a bit overweight. I was having too much work done,” she says.
“And through being there, some sort of self-discovery happened. The drink went, the weight went, and then I just was looking at my face thinking, this isn’t me anymore. So that went.
“I think it happens to a lot of us. I’m 48. You just start to not care as much what people think, and I think that makes a huge difference as well.
“I think the not drinking was the catalyst to just get back to being me.”
In July, Rita revealed she was going natural and removing filler in her lips and cheeks.
She documented the results on social media and likened her face to a “pillow”.
There was no pleasing everyone; Rita was trolled for having ‘tweakments’ and for ditching them.
She says: “You have to be really thick-skinned, but I don’t really care. I don’t really care.
“Another thing I’ve learned in old age is it’s really as long as I’m happy and my kids are happy, I don’t care who approves of my face or not.”
Pressure to look a certain way has always been there, from her time in a pop group in the noughties to the current day, with roles in the vein of glam US cougar Jennifer Coolidge requiring a certain aesthetic.
Though Rita believes things have improved.
Recalling her pop days, she says: “In a girl band back in the noughties, I was told I was fat when I was a size 8, so that wouldn’t happen anymore.
“We sort of came up in the industry in the nineties, in the Spice Girls era, and we were a girl band, and our stylist worked in Milan with all the models.
“She took us to London Fashion Week, and Jodie Kidd was on the catwalk, and she said, ‘that’s what you should look like, girls. You need to stop eating’.
“And they wouldn’t let us have food on our shoots, so it was really hardcore, and of course it led to us all being ridiculously skinny and obsessed with food. But no, I don’t think it has stuck with me.”
Instead, she’s determined to stand up to the nonsense to set an example to her twins Maiya and Jaimee.
“I’m good at going, ‘that was bullsh*t’,” she says. “I’ve got two girls to bring up, they’re adults now, but I’ve got two girls to show that we don’t need that sort of nonsense happening, because they’re 20 and they’re susceptible.”
