for CELEBRITY
With warmer weather - hopefully - just around the corner, Vanessa Feltz explains to Ed-in-Chief Siobhan Wykes, the good, the bad and the ugly on finally being skinny…
Vanessa Feltz was once a size 22. Has this tiny woman before us, twirling in a frilly flirty dress she helped design herself, forgotten what that was like? ‘Of course, the answer is no,’ she replies firmly. ‘I haven’t forgotten. Yes, I’m a size 12 now but 12 or 22, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is: are you a nice person? Are you kind? That sort of thing – that is important.’ Quite right, Vanessa. That said, for those of us who still want to drop a dress size or two, she reveals her secrets…
Vanessa – when did your weight issues start, were you a big child?
No. I was a slim little girl. I wasn’t into food. I was a picky eater. I was never the one tucking into the last piece of cake – that wasn’t me at all. Chubby just wasn’t how you would describe me at all.
So what age did your shape start to change?
Well, the first signs of bosoms came around nine, so my shape started to change quite early on, but not in a dramatic way – I didn’t suddenly gain a dramatic amount of weight, I just started to go in and out, but I think that was when my mother panicked.
What do you mean, ‘panic’?
My mother had always been overweight – not hugely, but a size 16 in the Sixties, a time when Twiggy was the look. She just wasn’t flat-chested and tiny. I think she saw me starting to go in and out like her and panicked. She started to ferociously diet me – to the point, she would say things like: ‘We’re having soup,’ to my father and sister, ‘and Vanessa is having half a grapefruit.’ I genuinely believe now it was the start of my weight issue. As you know, my mum is no longer with us, so we can’t discuss it but my feeling is that essentially, she handed me her weight issues. I was hungry the whole time.
So what size where you by, say, 16 years old?
Probably still a 12 but my mother was treating me as if I was a 22. She put an actual lock on the chocolate cupboard. So when I went to university, I wasn’t under her control and I had money to live on, I ate all the things I wasn’t allowed to eat at home – chocolate, apple juice… If you gave me a packet of Rolos, I would eat them in five minutes. I didn’t want to control myself.
Was your weight gain gradual or dramatic?
Gradual. I was still around a 12 when I married, a 14 after my first baby, then a 16 but, the whole time, my size was treated as a problem by my parents.
So, by the time you got famous in the Nineties on The Vanessa Show, what size were you?
Probably an 18/20. Then I went to The Big Breakfast, I was about a size 22 on the bed.
