As TV star Phillip Schofield prepares to release his new autobiography, he praised his This Morning co-host Holly Willoughby for all her support when he went public with his sexuality.

In an interview with The One Show, he described how the pair had a secret meeting in advance of his coming out on their show. “We’d had a big lead up to that moment and when I knew what I had to do Holly was one of the first people I told. She is such a wise person, she has got such a calm, sensitive aura to her. We had to figure out how we were going to do something like that, and that’s the worst thing about it. If you’re going to do something in public, it had to be public.

“I said to Holly, ‘I’ll do it on a Thursday morning and then I’ll go and you carry on the show with someone else’. We were in a bar in London, secretly having this meeting and she said: ‘You’re joking there’s no chance that you’d leave and I carry on’. And so she said, ‘We’ll do it on a Friday and ask Eamonn and Ruth if we can nick 10 minutes of their show and then we leave together.'”

Schofield continued, “I couldn’t have done that with anyone else, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to be sitting by the side of me.”

In his biography, Schofield also revealed that his health suffered greatly trying to keep his sexuality a secret. He recalled being unable to sleep or eat, writing, “My weight dropped and as it hit 9st 12lb, the This Morning viewers started to notice. I was getting tweets from people asking if I was ill.”

He added in an interview with Lorraine Kelly, “It went round and round, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I was walking into make up… and people are saying, ‘You okay? Had a nice weekend?’ And I knew I had spent the whole weekend staring into the fire, thinking, ‘What am I gonna do?'”

It got to the stage where he had no choice but to share how he felt – “If not, the secret was going to give me a total breakdown… at best.”

Since coming out, Schofield revealed how his relationship with Stephanie Lowe – who he was married to for 27 years – and his daughters is incredibly important to him: “I am very conscious of Steph and the girls, we all went out for dinner a couple of nights ago. I am still me, they are still them, it’s still us four, but different.”

Phillip Schofield – ‘Life’s What You Make It’ is released today.