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Nigella Lawson has admitted she was naive to share so much of her private life when she first started on TV more than 20 years ago and says she is now much more 'guarded'.

The celebrity chef, 61, made her cooking show debut in 1999 with Nigella Bites, and in the opening minutes viewers saw the mother-of-two take her children shopping, bathe her son and whip up a meal in the unpretentious kitchen of her family home. 

It is a stark contrast to her most recent series, Nigella's Cook, Eat, Repeat, which aired last December and saw the chef demonstrate recipes in a kitchen that had been meticulously styled and dressed. 

Speaking on an episode of the BBC's Food Chain podcast, Nigella said she 'didn't think it was odd' to offer up so much of her private life in her early shows.  

© Provided by Daily Mail1999: Nigella Lawson made her cooking show debut in 1999 with Nigella Bites, and in the opening minutes viewers saw the mother-of-two take her children shopping, bathe her son and whip up a meal in the unpretentious kitchen of her family home (pictured)

© Provided by Daily Mail2020: In her most recent series, Nigella's Cook, Eat, Repeat, the chef demonstrated recipes in a kitchen that had been meticulously styled and dressed (pictured)

'I would now [think it odd], but I didn't then. I suppose that's the thing about when you start something - you have a certain innocence,' she said. 

She admits that now she is much more 'guarded' and believes the world is 'crueller' and 'harsher' than it was.

'It seems to be a crueller world in terms of how we judge people now, and there's this real impulse not to see people as human beings with feelings and anxieties,' she said. 

'I think it's very harsh out there and it's exhausting, so if I was starting off now, I wouldn't want to be doing all that.' 

Private life: The cameras followed Nigella as she went shopping with her son Bruno

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The celebrity chef said she doesn't enjoy interviews, describing them as 'reductive and uninteresting' and said she withdrew from them completely in the wake of the public breakdown of her marriage to Charles Saatchi in 2013. 

'I just stopped reading newspapers for a while, and I certainly stopped giving interviews,' she explained. 

However she still feels the urge to share some parts of herself. 

She added: 'I'm probably less open than I was. It's not that I don't want to say a lot of things. It's complicated. 

'I think there has to be a balance between being guarded and oversharing, and whether I get that balance right I don't know. I don't think there's any getting it right.'

© Provided by Daily MailClosing off: Nigella said she stopped doing interviews in the wake of the public breakdown of her marriage to Charles Saatchi in 2013. Pictured, the couple in 2009