The shocking separation of Ant Anstead from Christina Anstead left him in “a very dark place”.
The presenter of “Wheeler Dealers”, 41, married the HGTV star, 37, in 2018 after a turbulent transatlantic romance, welcoming son Hudson a year later. But after less than two years of marriage, the couple announced their surprise separation.
Anstead confesses that the breakup brought him down, but he is slowly recovering.
“Every day is an improvement,” he told People. Obviously, going back a few months, I mean, it was a huge success. “
The physical result was a weight loss of 20 pounds.
“It really hit me a lot,” confessed the former policeman. “The impact on me, my sleep, my diet, my stress, it showed.
“But I got to a turning point where I would either live in the dark or just slap myself in the face a few times and say, ‘Wake up; you are incredibly blessed. Focus on all the great things. ‘”
One of the things he did was to sign up for a 35-day “separation recovery” online course and a three-day religious retreat that made him realize “how incredibly worthy I am for healing”.
Anstead also said he depended on his two oldest children from his first marriage – Amelie, 17, and Archie, 14 – who live in the UK with his mother and his first wife, Louise.
“They are genuinely my best friends,” he said of the teenagers, adding that the call telling them about the breakup was “very, very difficult.
“They loved Christina – they still do – and they really wanted us to work,” he explained. “I think that every child just wants to see their parents happy.”
And Anstead found joy in his youngest son, whom he nicknamed Hudzo.
“This process without him would have been incredibly difficult,” he said. “It filled my heart. He really saved me. ”
The California-based TV personality would like to maintain a close relationship with Christina’s two children, Taylor, 10, and her son Brayden, 5, whom she shares with her first “Flip or Flop” husband, costar Tarek El Moussa.
Still, it is a slow process for Anstead.
As he noted, “there is no quick fix for a broken heart”.
Christina, meanwhile, fixed her broken heart by buying a yacht called Aftermath.