My health is important to me. I run with my dog, twice or three times a week. I'm in Eastbourne at the moment, so I went for a run this morning along the coast. I tried doing yoga, but I have dislocating shoulders, one of which has been pinned, so I find things such as yoga and pilates, where you have to stretch quite high up with your arms and things, quite difficult.

London is not a healthy place. I feel much healthier when I'm living in the countryside or, indeed, anywhere out of London. When I go back to the countryside to visit my mother I get out of the car and suddenly there's great wafts of fresh air.

I couldn't do without smoking. I do like a drink after a performance, because you get so pepped up that it just helps get you back to normality - a glass of wine afterwards, or a pint of Guinness in my case. I do cook a lot for myself. I tend to cook from scratch, a lot of stews and things, lots of beans, because beans have got lots of protein in them but not fat. I am partial to a bit of cheese - I try to limit myself in my cheese intake, but I do enjoy a good smelly cheese. Stinking Bishop is a good one.

My father was obsessed with exercise. He was a pole vaulter in his first career. He took me running really as soon as I could walk, up the South Downs. We used to have gymnastics, trampolining, tap, ballet, aerobics, swimming, diving . . . I had a strict regime growing up, so I've got it in the blood. I used to do tetrathlons, which are horseriding, swimming, shooting and running. That was when I was younger. I haven't done one for, oh, my God, 13 years. Though it did help me do the marathon last year, which was exhausting. And despite getting proper running shoes, I ended up still losing two toenails. It's the pressure of running, I don't know how many steps, but it's something absurd, such as 400,000. I could feel my toes were bleeding by the end, and I didn't want to peel my socks off, because with them came my toenails.

I don't diet - ever. I did diet once, when I was about 17, and I found my nose got very dry. Also, it can make one very bad-tempered. And doing things such as a play, it's essential to have lots of energy, especially if you're doing nine performances a week, which we are sometimes. It's a very physical play, the one I'm doing at the moment; I have to do a lot of stunts, like falling off tables and rolling around.

I don't think size zero can be maintained. Also, I don't think Atkins is healthy. I watched a programme recently that was about the Elizabethan diet (The Supersizers Go Elizabethan, BBC2), and the people doing it lost a lot of weight, because it was a lot of meat.

They were basically on Atkins, but everyone died really early back then, because they were eating four times as much protein as was healthy. So I think it's more sensible just to eat what you fancy when you fancy, but just be restrained.

Honeysuckle Weeks will be performing in Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, October 6-11.