ON THE COVER: MAEVE MADDEN
The Instagram star on refining her diet to tackle health issues.
Irish Instagram star Maeve Madden arrives in our Dublin hotel suite with her London manager Andrew Selby, a pair of smiling, dapper blondes. Maeve, 30, from Newry, Co Down, is petite and as honed as you would expect of a gym bunny whose workout videos first attracted what has become an enormous social media following.
When she began posting about her polycystic ovary syndrome, adult acne and irritable bowel syndrome, Maeve inadvertently ‘found her niche’ as Andrew puts it, in the somewhat saturated world of food and fitness blogging.
(She also inadvertently benefited from Brian McFadden and Vogue Williams’s divorce; Selby’s agency 84 World, who represented both, parted company with Vogue in the aftermath, leaving space on the client roster for a glamorous, blonde fitness blogger across both the British and Irish markets. They signed Maeve 18 months ago.)
On a platform stuffed with patron saints of push-ups, pouts and power foods, admitting to having more plebeian problems – or being ‘flawsome’ as Maeve puts it – has set her apart. She has discussed her painful periods and irregular bowel movements, due to PCOS and IBS respectively. She has even blogged about having cystitis, prompting a deluge of homespun and medical advice from fans, which Maeve reflected in bullet-point form in a subsequent post.
But most popular of all – and the revelation that propelled her into the big league – were Maeve’s posts about spots and how to conceal them with artful strokes of a make-up brush. ‘I INTERVIEW PATRICE HARRINGTON PHOTOGRAPHS TOM HONAN had more of a response over the skin than anything else which is really interesting,’ says Maeve, whose adult acne is another side-effect of PCOS. ‘I think it’s because everyone generally gets breakouts, some people more than others. Everyone was like, “We’re so used to seeing such flawless pictures, everybody seems to just airbrush them majorly” – and I always use filters, I do like a filter on my pictures,’ she clarifies. ‘I think people just appreciated the honesty there and then the advice that I was giving. I talk about products that I use – I’m not endorsed by any brands to share that. I just share what I’m actually using and they appreciated that.’
Andrew brags that Maeve is ‘one of the first Irish influencers to work with brands like L’Oreal – she did a major campaign for them last December – and I think that’s testament to what she’s doing in the market’.
Maeve’s Instagram has become a forum for women – who make up 88% of her followers – to discuss normally taboo and embarrassing body issues. ‘I’m not sharing my very personal life on Instagram,’ she points out. ‘I’m sharing how I deal with everyday female issues and acne was one of them. I thought if you’re sharing pictures where you look almost pregnant and I’m talking about being constipated and period pain then I might as well share what my skin looks like,’ she quips, because Maeve’s decision to upload a photograph of her bloated tummy last summer has inadvertently led to the book we have met today to discuss.
Beat Your Bloat contains her recipes, exercise and lifestyle tips and is a journal of her own trajectory from a few short years ago when she was ‘lost’ and ‘probably anorexic’, to her current gut-guru incarnation.
‘It answers so many questions that I get asked on a daily basis and I’m always asked about nutrition and what I eat, what I’m doing at home, what remedies I have, because it’s all very ➤
natural. The ingredients I use are just whole foods. I felt I really needed to share that.’
Maeve’s story resonates with many women who have had their health problems trivialised; she was fobbed off for years when she went to GPs with PCOS symptoms. ‘I kept going and they kept saying, “Nothing’s wrong, it’s just your endometriosis”. One day I actually collapsed and was rushed to hospital and within an hour was on the operating table and I had two huge cysts that had ruptured. And they were like, “You have polycystic ovaries in both ovaries” and I said, “Well, I knew something more was wrong.” I get a lot of women who message me saying, “My doctor says...” And I say, “No, please go and demand to have a scan. It’s your health. And not only that but it’s your fertility. It’s so important.”’
Some have told her ‘heartbreaking stories’ and ‘positive stories too, like “because of you I’ve gone to the doctor, demanded this and now have a PCOS diagnosis. Now I understand what’s happening in my body”. Because there are obviously so many symptoms of PCOS like weight gain and facial hair and hair loss and acne. And not everybody’s symptoms are exactly the same.’
Maeve is reluctant to rely on medication to control her symptoms. ‘I just didn’t want to be filling my body with hormones and then tablets with the IBS. I know I can naturally help my body just by eating well and eating what I should be eating. I have been educated in nutrition. I did a nutrition course and I took a module in nutrition at university as well. I did a personal training course. I actually really love learning things.’
Indeed, she has had myriad career forays. Born the second eldest of five with a primary teacher mum and property developer dad, Maeve’s Irish dancing talent saw her tour with Michael Flatley. ‘I’m actually in one of his DVDs, the Celtic Tiger one,’ she says of the 2005 production. ‘I travelled with that show which was amazing because I got to work with every Irish dancer’s idol. He was so lovely. He was obviously super-ambitious but on stage he had just this amazing presence. He always made you feel like you were the best. He was also very motivating.’
Then she was in a car crash, hurt her knee and decided to quit dancing for a career in banking. She got a degree in International Business at University of Westminster, London. But when that was through, she thought she wanted to open a daycare centre, and did a post-grad in nursery school teaching.
‘That was the next career I had in mind and that didn’t quite work out. I didn’t really like working with kids,’ she grimaces. ‘Then I was kind of lost. So I took a year out and was coming back home and some of my friends were with Andrea Roche so I signed with her,’ she says, of the Dublin-based model agent. ‘I also signed then with agencies in London. I started working and doing commercial modelling. From there I guess social media came about and Instagram and stuff like that, and that’s where the path has gone.’
She has also dabbled in acting, with a small role in The Crown, playing an Irish waitress that catches the roving eye of Prince Philip. Her brother Joe, with whom Maeve lives in London, was a director’s assistant on the hit drama series.
‘He put me in contact with the casting director. I sent her my headshot. I’d done lots of TV adverts through being a commercial model and so I went for three auditions for my whole 15-second role. It still counts, I’m on Netflix!’ she laughs. ‘That was really nice and Matt Smith who plays Prince Philip was lovely to work with. We shot in Soho, kind of like in a bar there. It was really exciting. It was so great to be involved with something everyone was talking about.’
Before she joined Instagram in 2015, Maeve looked a heck of a lot different than she does now. ‘When I see how much I weighed then I probably was anorexic. It wasn’t severe because my parents didn’t notice but it’s only now when we look back at the photos I realise, I was actually tiny. I think that it’s not to do with the food, it’s just a mental thing, it’s a control thing,’ she says, of the illness.
‘That was when I was modelling and before this whole trend of being strong, not skinny.
‘I remember seeing Victoria Beckham on that show TGI Friday when I was 18 or 19 and it was after she left the Spice Girls. I remember Chris Evans bringing out the scales and getting her to stand on the scales and she was under eight stone. Me and my friends were all like, “Oh my God, we have to be under eight stone”. I feel like there was that whole trend then. When I was in the modelling industry, there was a lot of pressure to be thinner. I’m not sure what was going on – the stress of work and living in London and living a very hectic lifestyle – I felt like I was controlling things with what I ate.’
While the current trend for being strong surely beats being too skinny, like every fad it can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Maeve recently did herself an injury exercising her glutes in the gym. She had been trying too hard to get a bigger bum – a baffling craze among millennials.
‘That’s all thanks to Kim Kardashian,’ she explains. ‘Well, we could just do that instead of injuring my back,’ she adds, ruefully, of the rumoured implants the reality TV star has had to get her cartoonish shape. ‘I’ve been to see four
different physios and they have said that over the past two years this has become such a recurring injury for women that they had never seen before.’ Then she adds: ‘I couldn’t even put my shoes on, that’s how painful it was.
‘It’s a trend that I hope ends soon, I’m actually over it. I’m like, you know what? I don’t want to do this any more. I’m just going to have my normal Irish bottom. I’m not Brazilian. We’re not supposed to look like that. I’ll just be fit and healthy!’
Hopefully she will share this realisation with her 150,000 followers. What she hasn’t shared with the public until this interview is that Maeve’s boyfriend is none other than her agent Andrew. ‘I don’t really share that side. We’ve only been together a couple of months but obviously we worked together for over a year first. And then kind of love has blossomed which is really nice. We obviously work very closely together and I think he has the patience of a saint because I think I’m probably really difficult, not only as a girlfriend but as a client of his.
‘It actually works really well. It’s funny because we have a lot of mutual friends and just before I signed, someone had tried to set us up on a blind date,’ she grins.
‘Then when we first met there was definitely an instant spark. I was like, argh, this guy is really cute but nothing can happen because he’s my boss. So a year went by and eventually, it was last Christmas when he flew over to Ireland on St Stephen’s Day and told me he loved me.’
Though London is home for now, Maeve hopes to settle in Ireland eventually. ‘If I ever have kids I’ll definitely want to come home to Ireland. Maybe I’ll live in Dublin for a while but I’d definitely like to move home.
‘Being Irish is everything that I am and I think it’s something you take with you when you travel abroad. Every time I land in Dublin Airport I get so excited. There’s such a great buzz and it’s that home comfort really.’
Any plans to get married and have kids? ‘Oh my mum would just love that. She really would. She’d be like, “Why don’t you do that? That could be your next thing!”’ laughs Maeve. ‘Well, I don’t know. You never know where life is really going to take you and in this industry you never really know what’s going to happen. But we have plans for the rest of the year.’