Vanessa Feltz: 'My parents rang from their holiday to say I looked fat in TV ad'

Vanessa Feltz wants to make it very clear: She does not think her parents were bad people. ' It's just I think their parenting skills could have done with a bit of sharpening up,' she laughs.

Today in a heartbreaking extract from her upcoming memoir, Vanessa reveals how her misguided parents Valerie and Norman had a lifelong obsession with her weight, after she went through early puberty aged eight.

and at 12, she was skinny as seen in her but her mum was still keeping an eye on her diet.

As an adult every time she saw them - even after becoming a mother herself - they asked her 'Why are you so fat?' and even tried to bribe her to shed the pounds. And the first pictures advertising , her parents actually called from their holiday to say they'd seen them.... and to lose weight.

"'If you lose weight, I'll buy you a dress', 'if you lose weight, I'll send you to a health farm'. 'I'll do this if you just lose weight'. It was a constant refrain," remembers Vanessa. "O nce I had my own children, it really did become even more mystifying to me how enormously critical my parents were of absolutely everything I did...."

Now here in her own words from her upcoming memoir, opens up about why she felt such a heavy burden to please them....

BY VANESSA FELTZ

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. When I went home at the end of term 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.

My mother [met me at the door and] said: “Shall I bounce you in? You’re a great big pumped-up beach ball”.

By 24 I had surely delivered on the parental requirement to the letter. Cambridge. Marriage to a Jewish doctor. A flat. A baby. 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.

I was trying to make a living as a journalist.

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.

My mother had always had a weight problem – or, at least, her own mother, Sybil, thought so. So she pretty much had put her own weight problem in a box, tied it with a big pink ribbon and presented it to me, like a gift.

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...."

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

- 'I've had just about enough of being somebody access-all-areas lanyard' - Vanessa on dating in her 60s and the frogs she's kissed