About Us ThisisBigBrother.com

Red Moon · 04-12-2008, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Big Brother's Lea searches for perfection

Ex-Big Brother 7 contestant Lea Walker has just released a new book on body dysmorphia. Jennifer Scott discovers the truth behind her quest for perfection

THE next tweak to Lea Walker's constantly-evolving appearance involves the addition of hair extensions, which are being attached as I enter the salon where I'm due to meet her.

She's having red interwoven into the inky tresses that have superceded locks that were formerly, famously, blonde.

"You didn't recognise me, did ya?" she laughs, seeing me glance blankly around the room.

Embarrassing though it is to admit, I missed a woman with 30M boobs (the biggest in Britain).

In terms of the Lea Walker cavalcade of cosmetic adjustment, I'm way off the pace.

"How long have you been brunette?" I ask.

"A few months now," she breezes.

Carlton lass Lea, 38, will always be a work in progress.

The black-and-white cover photo of her new book Living With BDD (body dysmorphic disorder) shows a pouting, pencil-browed blonde.

Yet, despite the efforts she and others pour into the Lea look and the £150,000 she has spent on plastic surgery, she will never be happy.

Even now, she keeps peering into the mirror to announce how fat and ugly she is.

"No, you're beautiful," soothes Jo Capelli, her stylist and friend, but the words don't seem to register with Lea.

Lea's book Living With BDD describes her lifetime battle with dysmorphia, a condition which causes sufferers to view their bodies as defective – and continue to do so despite reassurances about their appearance. Its cause is unclear, but it may be genetic or caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

It is a self-hatred which, Lea says, led her into one difficult relationship after another, made her contemplate suicide and now drives her quest for constant shape-shifting via the surgeon's knife. "To constantly battle day in, day out with your body image is hard," she tells me, as someone switches off the radio so we can talk in quiet.

"Thank you babes!" she calls out cheerily, before resuming.

"I know there are millions of people in the world out there like me. But it's frustrating because there aren't the funds to help people. There is so much help out there for anorexics and bulimics. But if you were to nip dysmorphia in the bud, there wouldn't be as many anorexics and bulimics because eating disorders are a form of dysmorphia."

As well as anorexics and bulimics, obsessive body builders also fall under the dysmorphia umbrella, Lea says.

Lea is a "surgery dysmorphic", her illness having driven her to spend more than £150,000 in 11 years on successive nose jobs, a tummy tuck and boob jobs.

"It's my brain telling me, 'You are bloody ugly'," she says.

In her book, Lea describes growing up as the youngest of four in a mining house. Her dad Cliff worked in pits at Babbington, Newstead, Calverton and Gedling. Lea describes a childhood in which she frequently fell victim to bullies at Frank Wheldon Comprehensive. However, she doesn't blame her condition on these early experiences. "No, it's a neurological disorder," she says.

At 18 she became bulimic.

"That was all down to Vanessa Feltz," she says, perplexingly.

By that time, she was living with a body builder in Bulwell and weighed 23 stone. "I came home from work and Vanessa Feltz's chat show was on the telly and she had this guest who used to be bulimic.

"There was a cardboard cut-out of how big this woman used to be. She was a big, big girl about 20-odd stone, then there was this little skinny thing sat on the stage.

"She was going on about this bulimia. Then she spoke really openly about eating chocolate, cake and takeaways, then putting her fingers down her throat and that was how she lost weight. I thought, 'I can do that.' So that's what I did.

"I think I've got an addictive personality and I'd set my heart on being thin. I wanted to make my boyfriend at the time proud of me and I needed to be thin, so that's what I did."

She got married and gave birth to Henry, or H, her son of 13 years whom she describes as a godsend.

Pregnancy caused her to pile on weight again. Suffering with post-natal depression, she went to her GP who diagnosed her as dysmorphic and put her on antidepressants.

Lea said her weight dropped off again, she got divorced, moved into another difficult relationship and had an abortion and a miscarriage.

In her late 20s, she also had cervical and womb cancer.

"It went on for eight months and I thought I was going to die," she says. "I had chemo and radiotherapy. It made all my hair – everything fall out."

In despair, she twice attempted suicide. On the second occasion, a neighbour found her passed out from an overdose on the kitchen floor and called an ambulance.

Odd though it sounds, Lea sees the combination of plastic surgery and Big Brother as some sort of salvation. "Without Big Brother, I dread to think the way my life would be," she says.

By the time Big Brother came around, she had already had her 30M breast implants. Her divorce had left her in financial straits, so she made an adult sex film, sold her house and was helped out by a friend. Having paid off her debts, she could afford her surgery. It is, she says, her one means of feeling even slightly happier about her appearance.

"I don't regret it. I've had everything done you could ever imagine and I'm having more," she says.

"I know people say it's unnatural, it's unethical, it makes people look like freaks. But it's up to me if I want to look a certain way. You're a long time dead. If people don't like the way I look, I don't care."

Following the chemotherapy, her eyebrows had never grown back.

Knowing eye-pencils were forbidden in the house (in case they are used to interfere with voting), Lea hastily arranged to have her eyebrows tattooed on prior to the show.

"I thought I'm not going to go on national TV with no eyebrows," she said. "Could you imagine the press? They'd have ripped me to bits... this stupid girl with big boobs and no eyebrows," she says.

"Unfortunately, they went wrong because the guy that did them put them on too high. What could I do? They was there, they was on."

Lea had won over the show's producers with her brassy back chat. During the auditions, she had been asked: "What makes you stand out?"

"Well, what do you think?" she retorted.

What they didn't know was that when she had applied to do the show, her life was a mess. She was addicted to alcohol, cocaine and painkillers.

Although not an avid fan of Big Brother, Lea says she felt drawn to take part in the show. But once in the house, she says, she had a complete mental breakdown.

"I was a mess. I'd gone completely cold turkey. I had to eat and I had to keep the food down. I enjoyed the experience but I wish I hadn't been the state I was. I was a complete and utter wreck."

She was evicted in the seventh public vote, having found herself going head to head with her bosom buddy (so to speak) Richard Newman.

"It was between me and my best friend in the world," she sighs. "He never judged me and he was always there for me."

Owing to a rule-change, Lea was allowed to return to the house, briefly, before leaving with Richard to host their own show on Gaydar Radio.

"We're inseparable. We talk to each other all the time. If only he wasn't gay!" she sighs.

The radio show is no more but Lea has several more projects in store.

One of them is a small part in a film called The Rapture, which stars Jaime Murray, the Kemp brothers and Steven Berkoff. She can't say much about it but it's due for release next year.

And there's also been the publication of her book, which is part autobiography and part self-help.

Initially, she turned down offers to write a book, before eventually agreeing. "Just because I've been on Big Brother, doesn't mean I'm not a normal, everyday person," she says. "And I didn't want to be like Kerry or Katie Price with a new book out every two years.

"It was traumatic to go through some of the things I had to relive again but I did it and I'm glad," she adds. "I hope it helps some sufferers to feel they're not on their own. Dysmorphia is a horrible, horrible condition, babes. Horrible."

Her post-Big Brother life is a world away from her old one. She's dropped the drug and alcohol addictions, although she stills takes painkillers.

And the reason she stayed in so many unhappy relationships is simple, she says: "I thought I deserved it because I was worthless."

Lea's book Living With BDD is published by Apex and costs £12.99

Source: This is Nottingham