After suffering three heart attacks in her mid-thirties, healthy eating is now a vital way of life for Sally Bee. It's also pumped life into a new career and, as Hannah Stephenson discovers, she hopes there's more to come.

As a regular 'healthy cook' on This Morning, The Alan Titchmarsh Show and Daybreak, Sally Bee looks the picture of health, with long flowing locks and glowing skin.

It's hard to believe that a decade ago, at the age of 36, she was at death's door when she suffered three major heart attacks within a week, and the total collapse of one of the main coronary arteries.

Doctors thought she wouldn't survive and told her cameraman husband, Dogan, to say his goodbyes.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of her brush with death, but she remembers that dark period as if it were yesterday.

At the time, she had three children under five, didn't smoke or drink and was fit, just trying to lose the weight she'd gained having her daughter, Lela.

"I went to a child's birthday party and very quickly felt unwell," she recalls. "I had a feeling of impending doom. I handed my nine-month-old daughter to a friend, went to the toilet and then came out and collapsed."

The pain in her chest increased, her left arm went limp and she felt sick and sweaty. An ambulance took her to Warwick Hospital but paramedics thought she was having a panic attack, and she was sent home with indigestion medicine.

"I believed everything they told me - I had such faith in the medical profession, but I don't any more. I was having a heart attack all night."

The pain gradually subsided but, a couple of days later, it hit her again. "It was like a herd of elephants stamping on my chest."

Again, she was rushed to hospital, only this time the ECG results were shocking, and she was told she'd suffered a very serious heart attack.

Bee's condition deteriorated to the extent that she couldn't speak.

"The only thought in my head was to keep breathing. I made a deal with myself that I would just keep breathing. I think that saved my life at the time."

The team managed to stabilise her enough to move her to a hospital in Coventry, where she had an angiogram to assess any blockage in the arteries, but the surgeon was so shocked at the damage that he took off his gloves and left the operating theatre.

"The nurses and assistants followed quietly as if embarrassed - I was all alone. There was nothing they could do. They'd left me there to die. I thought for a moment that I was dead and this was what it was like."

She later found out that her main left artery had unravelled and disintegrated.

She was diagnosed with spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), a condition so rare that only 120 cases have been recorded since its detection in 1938.

"Dogan came in sobbing, saying 'I love you'. It was the moment he walked in that I realised I was alive. At that point, I thought about the children and that's where my survival instinct kicked in big time," Bee adds.

"Nobody can really explain why I survived that night. According to all the medical books, I shouldn't have."

As she regained strength, Bee created a new healthy eating plan for her and her family, believing that her diet was going to be instrumental in her recovery.

She's planning a big party in August to mark the anniversary, with healthy food on the menu, and has forged a career as a healthy eating expert on TV, while her fourth cookbook, The Secret Ingredient Family Cookbook, has also just been published.

Michelle Obama, a great proponent of eating for health, is among her fans. The White House ordered copies of Bee's first three cookbooks and she'll be sending the First Lady a copy of her latest one.

"It was all about taking control of my own destiny," she recalls of the changes she made.

"The way I moved and the food I ate had a massive impact on my health. If I thought, 'Oh blow it, I'll have a cheese sandwich for lunch', I'd sleep for 12 hours afterwards. But if I had something light and nutritious, I could walk down the drive and back.

"At one point, I had a Chinese takeaway and had to go to hospital because my heart rhythm went completely haywire. Very quickly I had to cut out all additives."

She continues: "One of the doctors in the hospital told me, if you can survive 10 years, you can survive forever. I think I'm Peter Pan."

She's not going to renew her disabled badge, given to her shortly after her heart attacks, and is now a trained therapist giving regular talks to heart rehabilitation patients, although counselling didn't help her personally at the time.

"I didn't have the right counsellor. She didn't identify what I needed help with. I wasn't unhappy, I was living on adrenaline. I wasn't depressed, I was scared of dying every minute. I had moments of insanity, thinking I was a ghost."

Today, she only wants to look forwards.

"The heart attacks no longer define me. I feel like it happened to somebody else now, but I do take great care of myself. I have to rest, I have to eat well and I'll be on medication for the rest of my life. But that is completely normal to me."

She doesn't go to the gym but exercises every day and often walks up to three miles. She can live life to the full - but with conditions.

"If I get a slight sore throat or cold, I'm wiped out and have to lie down. If I'm under the weather, my family leaps into action.

"The undercurrent of living with a heart condition's still there," she adds. "A sore throat to you may just make you feel a bit tired, but a sore throat could land me in hospital."

Her children - Tarik, 14, Kazim, 11 and 10-year-old Lela - now understand the severity of Bee's condition. "I do lots of work with our local heart charity and they come to certain events with me. They just accept it, because I'm so well."

Food and exercise have been her saviour, she reflects, having just done a glamorous photoshoot in homage to the film American Beauty - laying on a bed of tomatoes, one of her superfoods, instead of rose petals.

In the last few years, she's been in hospital around six times for precautionary monitoring and also returns for her six-monthly check-ups.

"They are anxious times and that's when it takes me back," she says.

When she had the heart attacks, her heart output was only 17%, and during her recovery, remained at 40% for three to four years.

But, "something changed a couple of years ago" and Bee's heart output is now 75%, which is the good side of normal for her age range, though she still has to take regular rests, switching off the phone and computer.

"My heart hasn't got a disease but has suffered this massive accident. My cardiologist now thinks he'll be treating me into my seventies. He'll probably be dead by then!"

Bee's career's blossomed, but she has to balance work with looking after her heart - and her family.

"I'm not being a diva when I'm scheduling in rest and asking for particular things to eat. It's not lifestyle, it's life or death."

She's currently in talks with ITV about her own series.

"I'm not Nigella yet, but it's my time," she says. "The next 10 years are going to be my best ever."

:: The Secret Ingredient Family Cookbook by Sally Bee is published by HarperCollins, priced £14.99. Available now