Are celebrity fitness DVDs A BIG FAT LIE?
As it’s revealed this TV star lost 3 stone on a starvation diet and NOT with the fitness regime she sold to fans . . .
THE woman smiling from the DVD cover is whippet-thin and wearing a bikini that showcases her lithe torso, tiny waist and toned legs. She’s recently undergone a drastic body metamorphosis, dropping five dress sizes and 3st in the space of a few short months.
And, she says, with just a few minutes of exercise a day, you could do the same — with change from a £10 note to boot.
It is easy to understand the lure of celebrity fitness DVDs to those with weight to lose, but little money to spare for a gym subscription.
Easy, too, to understand why the prospect of making such a DVD appeals to the celebrities in question, many of whom already earn a living exposing swathes of flesh on reality TV. Releasing a workout will boost their profile, help them shed those pesky pounds and earn them a hefty pay cheque.
But, as reality star Scarlett Moffatt discovered, there can be drawbacks.
Recently, it was revealed that Scarlett, 27, hadn’t achieved her 3st weight loss through the seven-minute workouts on her SuperSlim Me Plan DVD, but by exercising at a gruelling bootcamp in Switzerland, while reportedly surviving on 700 calories a day — almost half the 1,200 calorie allowance she advises on her DVD.
Scarlett, who won ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here! in 2016, was said to be exhausted and upset by the draconian regime. And her fitness trainer, David Souter, claimed she is not alone.
Souter, 45, who has trained stars including Geordie Shore’s Vicky Pattison, 30, before they released DVDs, says many go on drastic diets and attend bootcamps to lose the weight agreed in their contracts, before claiming their transformation can be achieved by eating sensibly and doing minimal exercise. ‘There are so many lies,’ he said of the fitness DVD industry.
of course, there are reputable workout DVDs — notably from presenter Davina McCall, 50 — but many stars admit the methods they actually used to make them lose weight left them feeling miserable and guilty.
Pattison, who lost five dress sizes and 3st to make 7 Day Slim in 2013, said in 2016 that she became ‘obsessive’, adding: ‘Because I was bringing out a DVD, I was under pressure to be a certain weight. In the end, it was unrealistic for someone my height.’
FoRMER
EastEnders actress Nadia Sawalha, 53, who lost 3st 7lb, dropping from a size 18 to a 10, for her 2010 DVD Fat To Fab, said at the time that her weight loss, billed as ‘ effective and long-lasting’ on the DVD cover, had made her ‘happy’.
But in a YouTube video last month, she admitted that she was ‘crying in the toilets’ while filming because she was so worried she still wasn’t ‘going to be the right weight’.
Now a healthy size 12 to 14, she says: ‘My family and friends said I completely changed. I had to be so focused on not eating and working out really hard.’
Another former EastEnders star, Natalie Cassidy, 34, who dropped four dress sizes and 2st 7lbs for her Then & Now DVD in 2007, before putting the weight back on again, said in 2013: ‘My friends said I looked gaunt and ill, but the DVD people were telling me I looked amazing, so I chose to believe that instead.’
Instead of her suggested diet of three meals and a snack a day, she was surviving on ‘ no breakfast, a tiny bowl of soup for lunch then a tiny salad’. She conceded it was the ‘wrong way to lose weight and wrong that the public believed I’d done it the right way’.
And what about the women who pay to lose weight following these workouts? They might be forgiven for feeling duped.
‘These DVDs are misleading,’ says British celebrity fitness trainer Cornel Chin. ‘It is nonsense to say you can lose several stone doing ten minutes’ exercise a day. Viewers will invariably end up disappointed.’
In an age where workouts are available for free online, celebrity DVDs have to have the edge if they are to sell. But what exactly does making one entail? And who really stands to profit?
The most prolific figure in the industry is a formidable, blonde mother- of-two whose name is conspicuously absent from the covers of the DVDs she has made. She has no website, no star billing and — seemingly — little desire to talk about her success.
Despite starting her career as a TV-am presenter in the Eighties, Jayne Irving, who owns Big Shot Productions with her director husband David, now largely shuns the limelight.
Nonetheless, she could be said to have monopolised the market, producing DVDs from actresses Patsy Palmer and Charlie Brooks, weathergirl Clare Nasir and, most recently, reality TV stars Vicky Pattison, Lauren Goodger and Scarlett Moffatt.
Irving, 61, has made a fortune persuading chubby celebrities to slim. Home is a £4.6 million apartment in a mansion block in Hampstead, North London. Her street is lined with shiny Bentleys and Maseratis.
It is perhaps unsurprising that those who have worked with Irving, who watched her profits grow from £ 409 in 1994 to £702,115 in 2016, describe her as savvy, but ruthless, and, as was recently reported, not averse to chivvying along her celebrities with what could be construed as aggressive text messages.
She is instinctively familiar with the well-worn process, which, for Big Shot Productions, starts with the stars and trainers signing a contract forbidding them from talking about what making a DVD entails.
‘It is written into most DVD contracts that there has to be an overweight “before” picture,’ says a source who has worked on slimming campaigns.
The more unflattering the picture, the better the DVD will sell.
Big Brother star Josie Gibson was pictured on a beach with her tummy wobbling in her
size 20 bikini, before Josie Gibson’s 30 Second Slim came out in 2012.
The pictures, normally choreographed between the celebrity’s agent, a photographer and, often, the celebrity themselves, are sometimes then cited as a spur to slim. Nadia Sawalha — whose DVD is believed to have been made through the TV company she owns with her husband — claims an apparently unexpected set of unflattering photographs of her eating muffins in a bikini in 2010 served as a ‘light bulb’ moment.
‘I was nearly three-and-a-half stone overweight, then the unthinkable happened. I got snapped, in a park, in a bikini, with my blubby stomach hanging out. Humiliating or what?’ she said on her DVD.
Most recent celebrity DVDs comprise short sessions of highimpact aerobic exercise — with the tacit suggestion, of course, that minimal commitment is required.
Pattison’s 7 Day Slim, for which she is said to have been paid £160,000, is divided into ten-minute segments — ‘just one a day is all you need!’ reads the blurb.
Scarlett Moffatt’s SuperSlim Me Plan, meanwhile, is divided into short workouts of ‘between 5-7 minutes max!’ with no exercise lasting longer than 30 seconds.
Sometimes, consumers are dazzled by calorie counts — the front of Clare Nasir’s Boot Camp flags up her ‘amazing 1,000-calorie workout’, although presumably, you’d need to do all four of the 20-minute sessions on the DVD to expend that much energy.
‘Exercises are billed in minutes because it makes for a more digestible strapline,’ says Cornel Chin. ‘But even seven minutes of high-intensity exercise is not going to burn more than 150 calories. ‘Bear in mind that you need to burn off 3,500 calories per 1lb of fat and it’s hard to see how this will lead to extensive weight loss.’
Little wonder, then, that some celebrities supplement their purported exercise regimen with more substantial efforts.
In 2007, it emerged that it took former Coronation Street star Vicky Entwistle, now 49, seven months of four-hour workouts to lose the 2st 7lb she claimed fell off after three months of 50-minute cardio-boxing sessions for WOW! Vicky’s Weight Off Workout, a DVD released by Big Shot Productions.
‘She went on [TV show] This Morning to talk about how she’d lost weight,’ her former trainer Kevin Maree told me. ‘One of my staff in the gym was horrified, as they’d seen Vicky training with me and I wasn’t mentioned.
‘They said I had to tell my side. I couldn’t — because I’d signed a confidentiality agreement.’
The staff member hadn’t signed one, though, and the story emerged, with Jayne Irving reportedly telling Maree: ‘We are safe as long as none of us speaks. Even gobby Vicky has been told not to say anything.’
Irving later said that Vicky had lost weight ‘ mostly’ through her DVD routine.
Celebrities are monitored closely to keep them on strict diets. Usually, followers are advised to eat 1,300 calories a day over three sensible meals. But, says one agent: ‘To lose 3st in three months, you have to live like a monk. Agents act as a client’s willpower, telling them to cut out booze and lay off the biscuits.’
Another source says: ‘The celebrities weren’t allowed to speak out of turn about their diets. And if they didn’t lose weight, Jayne would get rid of them.’
Fitness trainer David Souter was quoted recently in The Sun On Sunday saying: ‘While Jayne didn’t know it, Scarlett Moffatt was at risk of injuries and doing serious damage because she was working so hard and eating so little.’
Last month, it was reported that Sophie Kasaei, 28, from Geordie Shore, had her plans to make an exercise DVD with Big Shot Productions shelved because she didn’t lose enough weight.
In a text to Souter, Jayne Irving complained that Sophie was costing her ‘a grand a pound’.
Irving apparently became ever more rigorous about stars’ weight loss as their deadline approached.
‘I don’t care what you eat, as long as you get to your target,’ she reportedly wrote to Moffatt.
STEVE
Kemsley produced around 180 exercise DVDs with such stars as glamour model Nell McAndrew, former Spice Girl Geri Horner and Rod Stewart’s wife Penny Lancaster, before leaving the industry in 2010, and is disgusted by the claims that celebrities have been starving themselves and going to bootcamps to lose weight for DVDs.
‘We would never have allowed this behaviour,’ he says. ‘We made DVDs that the celebrities wanted to do. Nobody starved themselves. Then, all of a sudden, fat celebrities who wanted to be thin started being used, because it sold.
He adds there are ‘no rules’ in the fitness DVD industry: ‘ Aside from the TV adverts in which you have to prove what you are suggesting is safe, it is self-governed.’
Given that celebrity pay cheques — as high as £1 million, including royalties — aren’t delivered until the stated weight loss has been achieved, it is easy to understand how stars feel pressurised.
Many put the weight back on quickly, which is perhaps why it is apparently written into contracts that stars have to sustain their weight loss for 12 months.
Lawyers for Big Shot Productions reportedly asked for Scarlett Moffatt’s £100,000 fee back after she was pictured looking larger.
A spokesman for Scarlett said: ‘She did go to a bootcamp and it was a horrid experience. She had to weigh herself every day and was put on a very low-calorie diet.’
A spokesman for Vicky Pattison said Vicky has been ‘honest about her weight battles’ for years and has started a personal training course: ‘Vicky has also been very vocal about the potential dangers surrounding quick weight loss methods, including fitness DVDs.
‘Vicky has never shied away from discussing her fitness DVD or the downsides of what she deemed as getting to a weight that wasn’t sustainable or healthy for her.’
In a statement to the Mail, Jayne Irving and Big Shot Productions said David Souter had ‘ cruelly revealed private texts, which have been taken out of context’.
She ‘ categorically’ denied giving any celebrity a diet below 1,200 calories and said her company is not taking legal action against Moffatt for £100,000 or any sum. She said her lawyers were taking legal action against David Souter, whom she described as a ‘Personal Traitor’.
Of course, the exercise DVD industry remains an asset to those who want to keep fit with minimal expense. But as producer Steve Kemsley puts it: ‘People who work in it have to be responsible.’