Fighting your own body for decades wears you out in a unique way. Vanessa Feltz is more familiar with that tiredness than most people. Her relationship with food and weight has been difficult, painful constantly public since she was nine years old and was made to eat a single grapefruit for dinner while the rest of her family had soup.
She is sixty-four years old, about nine and a half stones she exudes a demeanor that is neither quite victory nor defeat. To be honest, it appears to be a relief.
The neat before-and-after narrative that magazines love to promote is resisted by Vanessa Feltz’s weight loss story. There was no one pivotal moment, no clear-cut epiphany. In 2000, she dropped from a size 22 to a size 10 before gaining it back.
In 2004, two stones were removed and then put back. In 2007, three stones were dropped with the same outcome. In 2010, a gastric band caused issues.
2019 saw a gastric bypass and the removal of five stones. That wasn’t even the whole picture. Nobody anticipated the heartache involved in completing the task.
When singer Ben Ofoedu’s infidelity was discovered in 2023, ending their 16-year relationship, Feltz experienced a change in herself that no surgical procedure could fully address. She has been remarkably open about this, stating in her Mail Online column that her current size is due to a “gastric bypass plus broken heart” with the dry gallows humor that only comes from having actually experienced it.
She acknowledged that the horrific conclusion of that relationship had ruined her appetite. It hasn’t completely returned after three years she believes it will eventually, which, depending on your point of view, can be both honest and unsettling.
She told OK! magazine earlier this year that work is what has kept the weight off alongside all of this. A nearly ridiculous amount of labor.
She hosts LBC on Saturdays and Sundays her self-titled Channel 5 talk show airs every day. Her statement, “I’m just working seven days a week”, sounded more like a practical observation than a boast. It appears that staying busy has evolved into a kind of appetite suppression in and of itself. This isn’t exactly what a nutritionist would advise, but it may be more truthful than most wellness-related advice.
She recently celebrated her 63rd birthday somewhere sunny, sharing a birthday photo in a pink maxi dress that garnered the kind of attention on social media that her figure has consistently generated, whether people wanted it or not.
Feltz has discussed the casual cruelty that followed her thru decades of television and the fat-shaming she experienced throughout her career. She wrote that it’s “fun and fabulous” to be thin now, but she took care to avoid coming across as critical of her former self”.I look like myself, but I’m scrawnier”, she remarked. It’s difficult not to see some serenity in that phrase.
When considering Vanessa Feltz’s weight loss journey as a whole, the most remarkable aspect is probably how much of it was influenced by outside factors. a diet culture from childhood that caused damage. A body that resisted and gave in at its own pace a complicated surgical procedure. A relationship that ended and changed her body in ways that no diet plan could have predicted.
She says that the loss of her gallbladder “affected my whole personality” and that it happened after she lost a lot of weight in 2008. She rarely discloses this information to the public. That could be a metaphor, a medical curiosity, or both.
She isn’t portraying herself as a traditional weight loss success story. There’s no neat schedule to adhere to, no jabs to suggest no sponsored transformation arc.
Instead, she provides something more uncommon: a decades-long story of a woman who tried, failed tried again before coming to a place where she could live, shaped by grief, surgery, unrelenting work time. It appears that the question of whether that is a strategy or simply a way of life is still being worked out.