TV legend Vanessa Feltz has always been open about her weight battles.

But now in the , the beloved star opens up about the real reasons for her yo-yo dieting - revealing how her own mum, Valerie, who she calls 'My Mother, My Dealer' in her new book, put her on a strict diet aged nine and got her hooked on black market amphetamines at 20, just to make her lose weight.

Today, in an exclusive extract from her , Vanessa Feltz bravely confesses how it led to an eating disorder, lifelong insecurity and a gastric band nightmare….

BY THE time I was 20, my mother Valerie had begun scoring diet pills for me from her hairdresser. There’s nothing quite like taking drugs illegally obtained by your loving mum. Mine was high as a kite and the slimmest at 43 that she’d been since her 18th birthday. But while I felt sick, the pounds magically evaporated. I slid into a size eight. I spouted hip bones.

Amphetamines: What a find – I didn’t eat a morsel of the formidable feast for my 21st birthday party. I’d ramped up my amphetamine dose and the little yellow pills wouldn’t let me. 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.

My mother was beside herself. She gave the hairdresser a thwacking tip. “Get us lots more, sweetheart – pronto”.

The side effects were nightmarish. Revved up on speed, your heart races like an overture to a cardiac arrest. The thought of food makes you heave. Your breath reeks of nail-polish remover. Everything is hectic and hallucinatory. I had been slim until – vengefully early at the age of eight – puberty struck, and I started what they used to euphemistically call ‘developing’.

My mother was horrified and whisked me to a premier paediatrician who declared: “Vanessa is in rude health. These small mounds, Mrs Feltz, are the beginnings of her breasts.”

Breasts! At eight! My mother panicked.

I didn’t look like Alice in Wonderland anymore; I looked like an almost-teenager with the potential to be podgy. She was determined to do whatever it took to bring it to a halt.

I did try to talk to her – she vehemently refused to discuss it – but she pretty much put her own weight problem in a box, tied it with a big pink ribbon and presented it to me, like a gift.

My mother had always had a weight problem – or, at least, her own mother, Sybil, thought so. Sybil was skinny and ravishing, rather like the actress Shirley MacLaine. My mother was pretty, but she was shorter, thicker-set and pear-shaped with a big bottom.

I had never been one of those chubby little children finishing off the birthday cake and looking for another biscuit. I was a skinny little girl who avoided sponge cake and cheese, and hardly thought about eating at all. So, when my body began to change, my mother thought: “Oh my God! Vanessa is going to get fat!” I was nine and fitted comfortably into clothes for nine-year-olds. Nevertheless, my mother began to curb, quite drastically and publicly, what I was allowed to eat.

We’d be having dinner, and she would announce to the rest of the family, “We’re all having the soup with [open itals] kreplach, kneidlach and lokshen [close itals] (wontons, dumplings and vermicelli). For you, Vanessa, half a grapefruit”. It felt like a punishment, and I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve it. I hadn’t been caught shoving chocolates into my mouth.

One day I wasn’t thinking about food at all and the next, without explanation, I was put on some sort of diet. My father Norman never came to my defence. I don’t know why. Maybe he was too swept up in his all-consuming narcissism to notice.

I do know he could and should have said: “Valerie. She’s nine years old! Why can’t she have soup?”

The regime was sudden and shocking. It left me with a new sensation: hunger. I’d never had the desire to pick the dried banana out of the muesli and crunch it. I’d never begged my sibling to ask for an orange between meals so I could eat it. And I was still hungry all the time.

At ten I went to senior school with two slices of white bread, a light hint of filling, and an apple.

By the time I got home at five, I was ravenous. I hadn’t eaten since 11am. My mother was adamant. No food would be served. Her words still send a sad shiver down my spine: “Dinner is at seven. You’ll just have to wait. If you’re really ‘starving’ eat an orange”.

She put a lock on the biscuit cupboard and hid the key. I never found it.

My attitude to eating changed. Whenever I managed – at a party or on my birthday – to get hold of biscuits or sweets, I devoured them instantly. I chain-consumed anything sugary with grim relentlessness. It launched me on a cycle all too familiar to anyone with an eating disorder or addiction of any kind. You eat to make yourself feel better, knowing you are already making yourself feel a whole lot worse. However, the compulsory diet paid dividends.

At the age of 18, I was a size ten, with a boyfriend and a place at Cambridge. In December 1979 when Trinity College rang with the news, my mother’s reaction: “You know you’ll fill up on chocolates!

She was right. I filled up on chocolates. Sainsbury’s was steps away and I had a whole £14 a week to spend on apple juice, Nutella, bread thickly spread with butter and jam – making restitution to myself for years of deprivation. When I went home at the end of term my mother said: “Shall I bounce you in? You’re a great big pumped-up beach ball”.

I was a size ten to 12, curvaceous and bosomy. I was fit, fanciable and a normal size for a girl from a dumpling-shaped family. There was no cause for counting each individual cashew nut I consumed.

Mum’s helpful donation of amphetamines coincided with my finals. The exam papers were a hieroglyphic blur. Who cared?

Cambridge. Marriage to a Jewish doctor. A flat. A baby. I was only 24. Hadn’t I delivered on the parental requirement to the letter? Was it too much to pray that my parents might wallow in pride, and pipe down about my weight?

At least once a week they came to dinner. I would blow-dry my hair and roast a chicken. The doorbell would ring and dire dismay would cloud their faces.

“Vanessa, you could be so pretty if you just lost weight. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

Never was I allowed to forget my fatness. And with every year, there was more fat for them to worry about. My weight climbed until I was a size 16 to 18.

Speed and motherhood didn’t mix so I dieted. I was now in charge of my own biscuit tin and had never been hungrier. Food became my illicit vice. I didn’t throw up afterwards – though sometimes wished I had. The girls were little. Funds were non-existent. I was trying to make a living as a journalist. How terrible could it be if I ate a couple of slices of pie?

Invited on to the radio for the first time to discuss an article, I was funnier than I’d ever heard myself be. I charged straight to my parents’ house. “Mum, Dad, did you hear me? What did you think?” My mother: “I’ve told you before. You must lose weight.” Me: “Lose weight? I’ve been on the radio.”

The official PR pictures showed me at 32, excited and optimistic, on the cusp of adventure. My parents were on holiday, saw the pictures and rang to tell me they hated them. I looked huge. My grin was inane. If ever there was a moment to lose weight, this, surely, was it.

Bubble burst, confidence nuked, I had to make an urgent trip to Sherrards bakery for an emergency doughnut. Right there in the public eye, on the television screen, I was getting fatter every day. Then my mother died. She was 57. Grief subsumed my hunger. I was so bereaved I was never going to eat again, not ever. Only I’d just polished off the chicken, the special rice and a dollop of trifle.

I was ravenous. I was also a size 20, edging towards a 22.

When I boarded the Big Breakfast bed they swathed me in full-length XXL chiffon. Then my husband left and I was too heartbroken to eat. A disappearing husband did what a dead mother couldn’t do.

was annihilated. Sticky toffee pudding couldn’t erase the sight of my daughters’ anguished faces as their father drove away. I grew thinner.

I made a weight loss video. By the end of filming, I’d lost another half-stone. But after I was eating again; caught in a perniciously public yo-yo dieting cycle. But each time it was harder to shed the surplus. Dieting had to become more extreme, exercising more violent.

Then in 2010, I met an old friend. I hardly recognised him. He was svelte. A transformation due to a gastric band. I was reluctant – what if I left motherless children behind? My surgeon uncle, Clive, was emphatic. “Have the operation. It’s not vanity. Yoyo dieting is doing you no good whatsoever.”

In bariatric surgery, they pop a plastic ring around the stomach, making the aperture smaller. Now it took me three hours to eat an apple and I’d bring up every bite. Chicken – no chance. Celery – don’t make me laugh. And I still craved sugar. Figure marginally less voluptuous but still creeping up from a 14 straight after the op towards a generous 16 verging on 18.

I probably would have soldiered on with the gastric band if, in 2018, I hadn’t become ill when the band slipped. A specialist bariatric surgeon asked if I had considered a gastric bypass.

“It will be the best decision you’ve ever made,” he said.

He was right. but the bypass isn’t one of them. You feel full quickly and have no interest in eating another bite. There’s no horrible downside. Since the operation in January 2019, I’ve been a size 12 to 14. If anyone tries to engage me on the subject of weight, I smile broadly and say: “Gastric bypass”. There’s nothing else to say.

, by Vanessa Feltz (Transworld, £22), is published on October 24.

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