Former Loose Women star Andrea McLean is moving to Florida

Andrea McLean is moving to Florida.

The former ‘Loose Women’ panellist is relocating to the Sunshine State “for at least a month to try it out” as she has spent months reassessing what she wants for her life following a life-changing experience on Channel 4 reality show ‘Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins’ in 2019.

Andrea is making the move with her third husband Nick Feeney and her two children, Finlay, 20, and Amy, 15.

The 52-year-old presenter told Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post newspaper: "When you get to your 50s you really take a long, hard look and think, ‘I am at the crest of the hill and looking down, is this where I want to be? I am 52, I may only have 30 winters left. Do I want to spend them in Britain? No, I don’t. I want to be somewhere warm and feel the sun on my skin.

“One of the good things about the pandemic is that it has made us realise we can literally be anywhere. We are booked to go to Florida for at least a month to try it out.”

Andrea - who has sold her Surrey home and is currently living in a rented house before heading to the States - knew 'Celebrity SAS' would “be challenging” but she didn’t know how much of an impact it would have on her.

Watch: Sir Rod Stewart Demands To Be Called 'Sir' By Andrea McLean On Loose Women

On the show, McLean took part in an exercise where she was “abducted and interrogation” by ex-SAS soldier Mark “Billy” Billingham and the experience opened a Pandora's Box of issues she had been burying.

She said: “I knew it was going to be challenging – the physicality of it – but it never occurred to me that mentally it would change my life forever.

"It was like a lid opened on the box and all the bats came out and I couldn’t get them back in again. When I got home I didn’t tell anyone and I tried to carry on like before. I tried to keep myself busier and busier and I just burnt out. I was so mentally and physically exhausted I was literally throwing up before going into work.

“One day I literally fell into a chair and sobbed. People were knocking on my door saying, ‘Hello, she needs to be in make-up.' I had to go on screen. So they patched me up and I gathered myself and did the show. And then I went home to Nick and said, ‘We need to talk. I feel like I am falling apart. I need therapy.'"

Twice divorced Andrea underwent professional counselling but she also credits her spouse Nick - who has two daughters aged 19 and 17 from a previous relationship - for helping her through this difficult period of her life.

She said: "Subconsciously I knew I could fall backwards because I was with someone who would catch me. He was the person who would find a way to understand and find a way to let me just be. I don’t think I’d ever had that before.

"Weirdly, having a breakdown was the best thing that could have happened to me because it made me stop. It was like hitting a wall. It made me re-evaluate everything. Breakdown is such an emotive, dramatic and scary word. But for me it was just caused by a series of papercuts, thousands of different things that had happened bit by bit and I hadn’t dealt with any of them.