Broadcaster Vanessa Feltz has admitted that she starved herself to lose weight on ITV's reality show Celebrity Fit Club, exposing what she described as the "horrific" reality behind the television series. The 64-year-old television presenter appeared on the programme in 2004, where celebrity contestants were subjected to gruelling diet and exercise regimes before having their weight broadcast publicly each week by host Dale Winton, who died in 2018.
Speaking on Andrew Gold's Heretics podcast this week, Feltz revealed that she would stop consuming both food and liquid in the 24 hours leading up to the weekly weigh-ins to lower her weight on camera.
"They would weigh you publicly on the show," Feltz said on the podcast. "Dale Winton, of blessed memory, would weigh you and your weight would be announced to the waiting world. And so for the day before, I would eat nothing and drink nothing, not even water. And then I would go to a really heavy sort of fitness class. And then I would go and be weighed by Dale Winton."
Feltz explained that the punishing pre-weigh-in routine created temporary losses on the scales that reversed almost immediately once filming concluded. "I'd be starving to death and totally dehydrated," she said. "So then I'd have a drink and a sandwich and then I'd already put back on the two pounds that he was just celebrating with the nation that I'd lost."
The former This Morning presenter described her overall experience on Celebrity Fit Club as "horrific, absolutely horrific", adding that the intense public focus on her weight led to hostile encounters with members of the public.
The mother-of-two recalled an incident where a stranger shouted at her from a vehicle while she was eating. "And you think, 'Oh, it's only an apple. And I haven't eaten anything at all for days.' It was that sort of thing. Horrid, horrible," she said.
Extreme dieting and public scrutiny
Feltz disclosed that she spent years enduring severe weight fluctuations while facing intense public attention, describing her body weight as "yo-yoing like absolute buggery" while newspaper headlines praised her when she grew slimmer.
She recalled prolonged periods where she would spend as long as a full year "barely eating and exercising like a fiend" to reduce her weight, only to regain the pounds after eating foods she had previously denied herself.
Celebrity Fit Club ran on ITV until it concluded in 2006, featuring famous contestants such as Alison Hammond, Coleen Nolan, Julie Goodyear, the late Ann Widdecombe, and the late Freddie Starr. An American adaptation of the format aired on the VH1 network for seven seasons before finishing in 2010.
Feltz's remarks come amid wider reassessment of reality television shows from the early 2000s, which frequently used weight as a punchline and promoted extreme thinness. Last year, former Celebrity Fit Club therapist Marisa Peer discussed tactics used by contestants to drop weight before weigh-ins, noting that some participants abstained from food, though she did not identify Feltz at the time.
Reality television reckoning
The treatment of contestants on early weight-loss and makeover broadcasts has faced growing scrutiny across international media formats. Last year, the Netflix documentary series Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser re-examined the controversial American weight-loss show and the physical demands imposed on participants.
Similarly, this year's documentary release Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model prompted renewed debate regarding body-shaming, humiliation, and the treatment of young models competing on the fashion series.
Feltz stated that her decades of repeatedly losing and regaining weight eventually contributed to her decision to undergo weight-loss surgery. She had a gastric band fitted in 2010, but the device later caused complications when it became embedded in her liver and had to be surgically removed.
In 2019, she underwent a gastric bypass procedure at the same time, having initially been horrified at the prospect of a more invasive operation.
Surgical complications and appetite medications
Reflecting on her gastric band, Feltz described the device as "an absolute farce" due to the physical difficulty of swallowing solid food. She recounted a journey from Manchester to London during which she spent the entire trip attempting to eat a single apple because each bite was so difficult to get down.
Feltz also joked on the podcast that she regretted the timing of her procedures given the recent emergence of weight-loss injections such as Mounjaro and Wegovy. She remarked that had she known prescription appetite suppressants were coming, she would have avoided paying "an absolute fortune" for surgery and instead taken "a few jabs" and been "skinny as hell."
Looking back at the years of public attention surrounding her physical appearance, Feltz acknowledged that the experience had been deeply painful. Asked how it felt when people were cruel to her about her weight, she replied simply: "Horrible. Obviously. Horrible."
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