Yvie Jones reflects on 'mortifying' TV moment: 'Never spoken about this'

Trigger warning: This article contains content around eating disorders that some readers may find confronting

From Merlin Luck’s protest on Big Brother to Paulini’s gold dress moment on Australian Idol, there are several Australian reality TV moments that will live in our heads rent-free for years to come. Among the most powerful scenes in recent years is when Yvie Jones delivered an emotional speech about body image on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! in 2019.

The Gogglebox star chose to take a stand and refused to participate in a weigh-in to see how much weight each contestant had lost in the jungle. She teared up as she told her co-stars - and viewers around the world - that she’s had an eating disorder for most of her life and couldn’t remember the last time she weighed herself.

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“I wish we lived in a different world where what we looked like doesn’t matter,” she said. “I know that a lot of people think they understand what it’s like, but unless you’ve had an overweight problem, you don’t know what it’s like to go through life and be judged solely on the weight that you are or the clothes that don’t fit you properly.

“I feel like we’ve all been doing so well and now we’re gonna celebrate how much weight we’ve lost and that somehow is something to be proud of, and I don’t think it is something to be proud of,” she said, before requesting that her pre-show weight was taken off the board.

Yvie reflects on her powerful speech five years on

For the first time since filming the show, Yvie has opened up about her speech that travelled around the world and shared an insight into how she felt in that moment.

The TV personality appeared on the podcast Well Enough Alone - A Guide To Thriving Solo this week and revealed that while the remaining contestants' weights were displayed alphabetically, she thought they were organised numerically.

“I saw the numbers and I was the only one in the triple digits,” she said. “All I could see was double digits and me at the bottom and I thought that's how they’d written us, like thinnest to fattest.

“The thing that really got me at the time, and I’ve never, ever spoken about this publicly, was Angie [Kent] was at the top and she only weighed 52kg, and I was at the bottom and I weighed 112kg. So that’s more than double her.

“It was just so blatantly embarrassing and shameful. Are they doing this to stitch me up? These are the things that were going on in my head.”

'It was a really defining moment'

Yvie shared that it felt like a “montage” played in her mind where she considered what her dad, brothers and ex-boyfriends would think if they knew her weight. It was at that moment that the voices of both Oprah Winfrey and Brené Brown popped into her head and told her it was okay to refuse the task.

“I thought, I'm either gonna ruin this and they're just gonna cut it out because it's reality TV and they're gonna be pissed with me for ruining this moment. But I knew TV enough to know if I did it right, I could make this powerful enough to just help one woman. Just one woman, that’s all I wanted to do,” she recalled.

“When I finished, everyone clapped. The crew were behind me and I turned around to look at them and they were all crying, and the majority of them were men… It was a really defining moment.”

She added that although she received thousands of positive messages from all over the world praising her words, she didn’t want to be “the face of body positivity”.

“I thought, I've lived my whole life letting my weight define who I am. I don't want to still let it define who I am. There's so much more to everyone than what we look like or how much we weigh,” she said. “But it's still something that I have and I'm so proud.”

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Following Yvie’s speech, I’m A Celebrity has stopped showcasing how much weight the contestants have lost in the jungle.

For confidential support about eating disorders and body image issues you can free call the Butterfly Foundation National Hotline Support for Eating Disorders and Body Image Issues | Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673.

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