Chloe Madeley's nine-word reason for slamming the body positivity movement

Chloe Madeley has spoken out against the body positivity movement admitting she is not a fan as it has a negative impact on her personal training clients. The mum of one, who is the daughter of Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan has worked in the health and fitness industry for over a decade and formed her opinions having watched the effect it had on people.

Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk she explained: "I don't like the body positive movement because a lot of my clients come to me feeling a lot worse about themselves, both mentally and physically, for not being able to do that, and then [it is] really magnifying a problem that they have with body image.

"As a woman in the Western world, all you have to do is look at the research on women's perception of body image during their menstrual cycle to know how impossible it is to love your body month round as a female. It is not going to happen," she insists. "You're not going to fall in love with all your flaws.

"However, I am a huge believer in bodily acceptance. Of saying, and I do this all the time myself, 'Okay, if I want to get really lean and see my abs, I know what I have to do. Do I want to do that?' And if the answer is no, then I accept my body where it is. I tell that voice in my head to shut the f*** up, and I get on with my day.

"I think that is a much more realistic and achievable and healthy way to go about it, because otherwise, women get all tied in knots, thinking that they should love their bodies, and they're just having a really bad day or week with it and that's normal," she reassured.

Chloe has plenty of experience to draw on when it comes to this subject having reigned in her own training and diet at one point when she felt she was becoming too concerned with how she looked. “I think because I had a profile in the public eye and my body did start to change [when she started weightlifting] I started to find myself being much more concerned with how it made me look.

"It was fun at first. I want to be very clear that you can have body physique or body aesthetic goals and have a positive body image. And I did at first. But what happened after a period of maybe three, three or four years is that I was hyper-focused on how I looked." Since getting involved with health and fitness Chloe has regularly posted clips and photos from her workouts online and posts from this period show her looking incredibly lean.

"Of course [that look] became absolutely impossible to achieve and maintain year-round, because absolutely nobody can have extremely low levels of body fat and call themselves healthy year-round. It doesn't exist. It started to have a very negative impact on me, and I started to very quickly go the other way...I spotted it right away, because it was completely out of the norm for me, and I deliberately took a targeted year away from dieting.

"So I still trained, because I love training, and I still ate healthy, because I know how important nutritious eating is. But I stopped dieting and I gained probably about eight to 10 kgs. And I forced myself to get comfortable with it," she admits.

Chloe also confessed that she suffered from a common condition which can affect your body shape and has led to one of her new roles as she dealt with it. "I want to be very clear here that everybody suffers from bloating, especially if you're a female," she explained. "I'm one of those people who's always really, really struggled with it, and that's why I started taking [supplement] Symprove in the beginning. And that's actually why I carried on taking it.

"I noticed digestive benefits that went far beyond something as simple as bloating, which, as you get older, you realise isn't as big of a deal as you think. But it's had more of an impact on me that go goes far beyond that in terms of my digestive comfort. That's why I started taking probiotics in the first place - I was desperately trying to find something that would calm it [bloating] down.

"I used to do a lot of photo shoots, and it was always a gamble of how was I going to look on the day. And after all that hard work [in the gym], the last thing you want is to go into a photo shoot not looking like your hard work is being reflected," she explained.

"The supplement industry is kind of a bit of a cowboy industry, if I'm honest with you, especially when it comes to gut health supplements. I'm a really big believer in trying a product, seeing if any symptoms improve, taking it for a prolonged period of time...and then coming away from it for a few months and seeing what happens then. I've been taking Symprove on and off for about maybe six or seven years now - it's been a really long time.

Explaining the fact that Symprove is water soluble which means it can get to where it needs to she added: "I do notice a huge difference when I stop taking it in my digestion, in my immune function. So for me, it's always been one of those supplements that I'm like, 'I've tried it. I have my own anecdotal evidence.' It really agrees wth me and I really see huge improvements when I take it."

Chloe is working with Symprove which is a water-based probiotic that contains four unique strains of live and
active bacteria. Symprove is backed by GPs and health experts and boasts a 5* TrustPilot score with 9 out of 10 customers saying they would recommend it.