Mum put me on diet aged 9 and scored me some slimming pills when I was 20

TV favourite Vanessa Feltz has always been open about her weight battles but now in the second day of our Mirror exclusive she reveals the driving force behind her yo-yo dieting - her mother Valerie.

- VANESSA FELTZ

She put her daughter on a strict diet at age nine and got her hooked on black-market amphetamines at 20, just to make her lose weight.

Here, in an exclusive extract from her memoir Vanessa Bares All, the star 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 that was laid on 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 was instead 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 whacking great 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.

I didn't look like Alice in Wonderland any more; I looked like an almost-teenager who had the potential to be podgy.

And she was determined to do whatever it took to bring it to a halt.