Comedienne Magda Szubanski has revealed that her weight issues began at the tender age of 11 when her father suggested she starve herself in order to trim down.
“I had put on a bit of weight at eleven and my father started on at me … he told me if you lose half a stone you’ll fine,“ the 52-year-old told mamamia in a revealing interview on Tuesday.
“My father was overweight as a kid and his mother was overweight. He was in the prisoner of war camp and lost the weight and was very handsome.
“He said will power, starve yourself. But it propelled me into craziness … it messed with my metabolism. He was trying to do the right thing, bless him.”
Magda publicly lost 36kgs in 2011 when she was contracted to Jenny Craig as a weight loss ambassador; a deal that was terminated when she began to regain her weight.
In this interview Magda told Mia Freedman that the weight piled back on after she came out on national television as gay, because she used food as a coping mechanism when she was stressed.
“I have picked all the ways of the world that have [the word] shame attached to it.
“My weight was a flesh armour I created at time struggling with her sexuality. I put the weight back on when I came out, I felt intensely vulnerable.”
Magda details her battle with her weight, her sexuality and her father’s history as a German resistance fighter in WW2 in her memoir Reckoning.
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