The TV personality, 62, delved into her younger years and explained how they led to her yo-yo dieting, to promote her new book Vanessa Bares All, which was released today.

She admitted her problems with weight began at the young age when she was put on a very strict diet, and recalled being given just half a grapefruit for dinner.

Elaborating on that time, Vanessa told the panel made up of Charlene White, Brenda Edwards, Judi Love, and Kelle Bryan, ‘I was a little girl and I wasn’t one of those chubby little girls that likes eating cake, I was the skinny kind that’s not very interested in food.

‘Then I did this thing which my parents never really forgave me for, which is called developing. You start to get very tiny bosoms, I was about nine, my mum rushed me off to the specialist to ask “What’s going on with her?”

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Vanessa Feltz candidly lifted the lid on the difficulties of her childhood and how she was put on a diet as young as nine years old, during an appearance on Thursday’s Loose Women

The TV personality, 62, delved into her younger years and explains how they led to her yo-yo dieting

‘They said “Well Mrs. Feltz she’s developing” and my grandma said “That’s ridiculous, she’s only nine,” almost as if I’ done it on purpose, which of course I hadn’t.’

She continued: ‘And then I think my mum thought that my waist would go in and my hips would come out and I think she panicked I’d be fat. Now, this is the sixties, where everyone looked like twiggy.

‘Also they wanted me to be very marriageable and marriageable meant thin. But I was quite thin, and from that moment she sort of started dieting me.’

Recalling one specific moment from her childhood, Vanessa told of how she would be given different meals to the rest of her family.

The broadcaster recalled: ‘So we’re all having the chicken soup with vermicelli an with lovely dumplings and everything. Vanessa’s having half a grapefruit – and I was nine.

‘I felt as if I was being punished but I didn’t know what I’d done, and I wasn’t big, I was little. Pretty much from that moment my mother became effectively my sort of diet police.

‘Which is very difficult because if every time you raise a fork to your mouth your mother looks horrified what are you supposed to do?’

She told the panel: ‘You’re really hungry and if anyone gives you, say, an Opal Fruit, you can’t just eat one out of the packet, you’re going to wolf down the lot because you don’t know when you’re going to get the chance again.

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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)

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

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The broadcaster recalled: ‘So we’re all having the chicken soup with vermicelli an with lovely dumplings and everything. Vanessa’s having half a grapefruit – and I was nine’

‘It makes food a whole big thing. I really don’t think my mum did it on purpose but the net effect has been a very public weight problem.’

In The Mirror’s exclusive look at Vanessa’s new memoir, the star 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.’

‘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’.

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 it became embedded in her liver.

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She said: ‘I felt as if I was being punished but I didn’t know what I’d done, and I wasn’t big, I was little’

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.

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.

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