Vanessa Feltz says her battle with weight started after she was put on a strict diet aged nine and was forced to take black market amphetamines to ‘slim down’

Vanessa Feltz has revealed her weight loss struggles started after her mother Valerie forced her to take black market amphetamines to ‘slim down’ at age 20.

In her new memoir Vanessa Bares All, the TV personality delves deep into her childhood trauma and explains what led to her yo-yo dieting.

She admits her problems with weight began when she was nine years old and was put on a very strict diet.

In The Mirror’s exclusive look at the memoir, Vanessa says she was deprived of food and often went hungry because her mother didn’t want her to put on an inch of weight.

She said: ‘By the time I was 20, my mother Valerie had begun scoring diet pills for me from her hairdresser.’

In her new memoir Vanessa Bares All, the TV personality delves deep into her childhood trauma and explains what led to her yo-yo dieting (pictured in 1995)

‘While I felt sick, the pounds magically evaporated. I slid into a size eight. I spouted hip bones. Chunks of skeleton were visible beneath my skin. 

‘I wasn’t slim but that holiest of holy grails – thin, verging on gaunt. I looked like a malnourished bush baby. It was all I’d ever wanted’.

In one childhood memory, Vanessa explains she was forced to eat a grapefruit for dinner while the rest of her family had soup.

Looking back at her past, Vanessa said it almost felt like a ‘punishment’ but never knew what she done to deserve it. 

Vanessa first slimmed from a size 22 to a size 10 between 1999 and 2000 but later put the weight back on.

She lost 2st in 2004 but gained it again, and 2007 she dropped 3st but it all returned and she ended up back at a size 22.

In 2010 she had a gastric band fitted which made her stomach smaller and stopped her from overeating but she suffered complications when became embedded in her liver.

Vanessa said she learned to eat in a different way with the gastric band – she was not able to eat large amounts of solid food but she could consume softer substances, such as ice cream.

She admits her problems with weight began when she was nine years old and put on a very strict diet

Vanessa says she was deprived of food and often went hungry because her mother didn’t want her to put on an inch of weight

In one childhood memory, Vanessa explains she was forced to eat a grapefruit for dinner while the rest of her family had soup

The former Celebrity Big Brother housemate said she ate ‘thousands of calories’ and sabotaged the operation she’d paid for.

She later decided 2019 to have a gastric bypass, which saw a small pouch created in the stomach and connected to the small intestine, bypassing the rest of the stomach and meaning she took in less food and felt fuller for longer.

The procedure led to her losing a further 5st and she has kept the weight off since.

Vanessa insists a lot her overeating was due to her mental state, adding that once she’d had her surgical procedures she was comparable to late footballer George Best who continued to drink alcohol despite having had a liver transplant.