Even after years of being questioned about her body, Lauren Goodger still exhibits a certain level of fatigue when discussing it. She has been living what she has described as a “party girl lifestyle” in public since 2010, when TOWIE first placed her in front of cameras. She drinks, eats, and doesn’t think twice about either. No one in the tabloids allowed her to forget that version of herself, which gradually reached a size 16.
Most people agree that 2015 was the pivotal year. She was photographed by paparazzi in a coral pink bikini on an Egyptian beach, and the images were so unflattering that she later said she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. She gave up alcohol and committed to the gym after seeing herself featured on magazine covers. In just six months, she had dropped four pounds, going from a size 16 to a size 6. From the back of it, she pulled out a fitness DVD. It’s the kind of transformation story that tabloids adore, in part. It’s dramatic and in part because, as it turned out, it didn’t stick.
She told New! magazine in August 2016 that she had gained weight again and that chocolate and carbohydrates had begun “creeping” back into her diet. However, the way she presented it is intriguing. She told readers that her curves had returned “bigger and better than before” and that she felt sexier with, in her words, a little more meat on her bones. Instead of viewing the regain as a failure, she embraced it. Additionally, she vigorously refuted reports that she had undergone cosmetic surgery, claiming that her altered diet and exercise habits, rather than a surgeon’s table, were the source of her fuller figure. It’s noteworthy that she chose to justify the weight gain rather than offer an apology, but only she truly knows if that account tells the whole story.
The last ten years of coverage of her have largely been characterized by that pattern: losing, winning, and being closely examined in any case. She started going to the gym every day by January 2017 and used hashtags like #noalcohol and #notextreme on Instagram to track her ten-pound weight loss. A few years later, her journey from a self-described size 18 to a “gym honed” size 10 was being tracked by profiles, which also raised awkward questions regarding the diet pills and “Skinny Coffee” products she had endorsed. It’s difficult to ignore how much of this cycle appears to be driven more by the audience’s apparent desire for either the dramatic before or the dramatic after, with little tolerance for anything in between.
Her approach seems to have changed a little since becoming a mother. She has publicly declared that she will not use weight-loss injections despite what she describes as pressure from friends who use them, and more recent coverage highlights her emphasis on bodyweight training and mindful eating rather than drastic dieting. Reading back-to-back years of these stories gives the impression that Goodger has spent the majority of her adult life negotiating her body in public, and it’s still unclear if she’ll ever have the opportunity to do so in private.