Peter Kay, 52, has shared a rare insight into how he’s struggled with his weight during his life in a candid conversation.

For the best part of three decades, Mr Kay has been a much-loved presence on the comedy circuit, with multiple sold-out tours under his belt and several award-winning TV shows on his CV.

But after taking a break from comedy in the late noughties, Mr Kay made a triumphant return a few years later, and fans quickly spotted something was different.

Mr Kay returned to the spotlight looking much more trim and quickly sparked rumours as to how he’d managed to shift the pounds.

The comedian had avoided mentioning his weight loss in public until this week, when he delved into how he did it as well as his history with body image growing up.

At an In Conversation With . . . event hosted by Sara Cox at The Lowry theatre in Salford, Mr Kay was put on the spot by the host as to whether he’d directly tried to shed the weight.

The 52-year-old comedian said: “Only for the first 48 years of my life.”

After drawing laughs from the crowd, he continued: “I had to, eventually, because you start thinking about your health and things like that, don’t you?

“I tried everything. Good God in heaven. I mean, you go to flaming weight-loss groups and stuff like that. I joined Slimming World and WeightWatchers. I did all of them.”

Mr Kay had previously joked about joining weight loss groups in his comedy sets, although this was a rare admission that he had genuinely taken part.

Despite spending the best part of five decades battling with body image and weight loss, Mr Kay conceded his willpower would often prove the biggest obstacle.

Discussing a particular lightbulb moment during a cinema trip with his wife, he said, according to The Sun: “We were sitting there and I thought, I fancy a hot dog. So I said to Susan, ‘I’m going to the toilet’ and I nipped out, went down and bought a hot dog.

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“I was doing really well with this diet, but I’m so bad with willpower. I had this hot dog, and I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in, ironically, a framed poster for Babe.

“I thought, look at you — what are you doing? You’re doing really well on this diet; you should be ashamed of yourself.

“And I got it and threw it in the bin — and just as it was about to hit the binliner, I grabbed it and still ate it.”

During the conversation with Ms Cox, which will air on BBC Radio 2 soon, Mr Kay delved into how his mother’s “obsession” with people being overweight may have played a part.

“Even when I was in my pram, apparently my mum used to get a meat pie from the market hall and put it on my knee, and I’d be there eating it,” he explained.

“My mum used to bring pies in for me at primary school. She’d go in and she’d say to the dinner ladies, ‘Can you give this to Peter?’ Everyone would be queueing up and the dinner ladies would be like, ‘Your mum’s been in with a pie’.

“My mum is obsessed with people being overweight, and she proper judges everybody by it. I’m like, ‘Mum, what does it matter how big people are?’. Because she really does judge everyone by how big they are.

“She’s like, ‘I think they’d better be careful’. She used to hide the biscuits in our house, but I knew where she’d hidden them.

“I used to have me mates round for a brew and I’d reach inside the tumble drier and get a packet of digestives out, like it was normal.”

Mr Kay continues to gig up up and down the country, with Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham and Glasgow in the pipeline in the coming weeks.