WHAT’S always refreshing about interviewing Chloe Madeley is that she’s never short of something to say. She’s got opinions – lots of ‘em – and doesn’t shirk from sharing them.
Ask her a question and you’ll not only get a straight answer but it’ll be a full and frank one, characterised by a neat turn of phrase and punctuated by frequent swearing.
So when questioned about her lips looking suspiciously more bee-stung than they used to, there’s no attempt to side-step.
“Yep, I had them done. And I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life.” More of this later.
On taking a year off her intensive fitness training and diet restriction: “It’s nothing to do with planning a baby. It’s just after three years my body is like: ‘You can go f**k yourself.’”
And Piers Morgan? “An arsehole.”
Ahem. This is in response to speculation that Piers might be irritated about Chloe’s dad Richard Madeley’s “triumphant” headline-grabbing performances as his Good Morning Britain holiday cover.
“Honestly, anything that p**ses Piers Morgan off I’m down with. Urgh. What an arsehole.”
Chloe is loud, expressive, unashamedly herself and enormous fun. She’s also relishing the fact that after years of putting her body through sheer hell for her work as a PT, author and fitness model, she’s finally giving it a break.
There can’t be many people looking forward to a summer break more than Chloe – both she and newly retired Lions rugby star husband James Haskell are more than ready to party.
“We’re gonna get so fat,” she laughs. “And drunk. Remember Joey and Janice’s day of fun on Friends? This is James and Chloe’s year of fun!
“We’ve earned it. We’ve never had spontaneity but now we can be like: ‘F**k it!’ We can go into the pub and drink for two hours. We can go into the gelato store in Italy and have a blowout. These are all firsts, and it just could not have come at a better time.”
Chloe, 31, says her body is screaming for a break from the constant carb cycling, shredding and reversing – her bestselling books The 4-Week Body Blitz and The Fat-Loss Blitz have meant it’s been her job to be super-lean.
“I love training, but it’s really hard to get amazing aesthetic results. And the more you diet, the more your metabolism adapts and lowers and it gets harder.
“I’ve done some temporary damage to my metabolism, so I have to eat less and train more to get results. I need to fix it and let my body breathe.
“I feel like I’m finally being forgiving of it and treating it very much as my baby. My poor old body. It’s so ready for a rest.”
For someone who oozes such self-assurance and body confidence, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that she’d undergo surgery to alter her face.
But Chloe’s been open about having had a nose job three years ago and today reveals that she’s experimented with lip fillers, although it’s not something she’ll be repeating.
“A friend of mine – one of the rugby girlfriends – got qualified to do lip stuff and she was like: ‘I’m gonna do it for free, do you want to do it?’ And I’d always wanted to try it so I said yes.
“She said for me it would dissolve in about three or four months and so I asked her to do a minimal amount.
“I immediately regretted it. It looked awful. But I told myself it was OK, it would go. But it’s still there eight months later! I hate it and I’ll never do it again.
“My brothers were like: ‘What have you done to your f**king face?’ I was like: ‘Don’t even talk to me about it.’”
James, on the other hand…
“Didn’t notice,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I asked him if he liked my lips and he said: ‘Why?’ When I told him he just said: ‘Why did you do that?!’”
Why, indeed. But Chloe says she’s not as secure in herself as she makes out.
“I was more body confident before I started doing what I do now. I was very curvy and had quite a lot of body fat but didn’t give two s**ts.
“I thought I had the best body in the world. Literally, in my head I was a Victoria’s Secret model. I look back at photos now and I’m like: ‘Er, no, babe, you absolutely were not.’
“But while I was fine with my body, I was miserable in every other area of my life. And now, whereas I feel happy with most of my life, my relationship with my body is very intense.
“My job is to constantly assess how I look. If I’d I come into this with a back catalogue of body issues, I think it would have been a s**t show. But I can handle it.”
The misery she’s referring to is the anxiety and panic attacks that plagued her early 20s.
It’s carefully managed these days with therapy and exercise, but at its peak it was crippling, and Chloe was self-medicating with heavy drinking which, of course, made things worse.
“I’d drink four or five nights a week, I’d chain smoke every day. I was so unhappy.”
Did she use drugs?
“Nah. I was never really a big druggie person. I smoked a lot of weed as a teenager, but that was just because my ex-boyfriend did it and I joined in for the LOLs.
“But I was just such a f**king mess. I was always quite anxious, but when I left uni and started to have serious relationships with men I became incredibly insecure about the fact that I was my parents’ daughter.”
Social situations became traumatic, and Chloe would torture herself for days after each one.
“I’d be having conversations and in my head like: ‘How am I coming across? Do I sound like an idiot? Do I sound stupid? Do I sound spoiled?’ Constantly monitoring myself. I was not happy with who I was.”
Discovering a love for training and a fascination with the science behind it provided the purpose she’d been lacking.
Book you read?
Tender Is The Night by F Scott Fitzgerald. I’m going to the South of France this summer and I wanted to get in the mood.
Box set you watched?
Game Of Thrones.
Movie you watched?
Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Best film of all time. I never don’t laugh and I’ve seen it a million times.
Time you had sex?
Two weeks ago, which is 10 days too long. James had to have an injection in his foot – his body is just broken.
Time you lost your temper?
Two days ago when James told me I was obsessed with food.
DM you received?
My brother’s fiancée messaging me telling me she couldn’t come to lunch with me today because Kit is feeling poorly.
She says it gave her an identity, passion, drive and structure.
“It took me away from being Richard and Judy’s daughter. It’s just completely saved me in so many ways. I still have self-esteem issues, but I don’t wake up and immediately start feeling the anxiety.
“Every day was a game of: ‘Am I going to have a panic attack today?’ Just awful, morning, noon and night.”
Deleting her Twitter account earlier this year has also had a positive impact on Chloe’s mental health.
She no longer has to put up with trolls casually dishing out rape and death threats or abuse about her body/looks/parents/life choices.
Her experiences have made her question everything she thought she felt about social media.
“Twitter just made me feel really upset with the general population. Some of the stuff I’ve received makes me sick to my stomach – rape threats, death threats, everything from the way I look, the way I talk…”
She’s far happier over on Instagram, although even that platform comes with its own, er, issues.
“I get a lot of d**k pics,” she sighs. “I think I’d rather have the trolls than those. A lot of the time it’s teenage boys, which makes me very uncomfortable because I don’t know if I’m breaking the law by receiving them!
Is this legal that I’m looking at your penis?!
“Men need to understand d**k pics are not OK. They’re not sexy. I think you have to be already pleasantly acquainted to enjoy a d**k pic. Otherwise, just no.”
Chloe and James, 34, married last December in front of 30 close family and friends – though there are plans for a bigger do with 250 guests next summer in either the South of France or Mykonos.
They got engaged in Paris last year after Chloe had seriously considered ending the relationship because James had done such a good job convincing her that he categorically did not want to wed.
“I had to think about whether getting married was so important to me that I was going to end a relationship with someone I loved. I didn’t know why he didn’t want to get married. Was it me? Him? Us?”
She recalls coming back from their summer holiday in 2017 to discover that four of James’ teammates had got engaged.
“That really hurt my heart, and I remember thinking: ‘Oh god, I don’t know if I can do this for the rest of my life.’
“Constantly seeing this happen and knowing it would never happen for me. It was a horrible time and I’m still mad at him.”
It meant that when James did pop the question, she was blindsided.
“Honestly I was completely floored. He’d been designing my ring for a year and a half. It’s crazy he’s my husband, but we both feel really secure in the fact that our future will be together. We’re stronger.
“I think marriage puts you on a really nice level playing field. We talk and joke and flirt, and it’s not lost on me how rare that is, and how wonderful.”
James has plenty of retirement plans, which see him booked up with DJing and after-dinner speaking gigs.
Chloe, meanwhile, is preparing for the release of her third book at the end of the year, which will focus on weightlifting, and a second series of her hit health and fitness podcast The Bodcast in November.
Babies are also on the agenda at some point in the not-so-distant, which is a turnaround from when we shot Chloe and James last February and neither was sure if they wanted children.
“James and I are much more talkative and thoughtful about it than we were. It’s definitely a lot more of a realistic prospect than it was.”
What changed?
“My nephew Kit was born and I’m obsessed. If you could think up the dream baby it’s him. Watching James with him has been eye-opening, and I think it would be such a waste if he wasn’t a dad.
“His life would be better if he had kids, and it took me seeing him with Kit to realise that. He needs a kid.”
She doesn’t have concerns that the eye-wateringly low body-fat percentages she’s shred herself down to over the years might have affected her fertility. Since coming off the pill three years ago her periods have been regular.
“My period kicks my ass. I go insane. I turn into a f**king psychopath.
“But I know I’m very lucky to have got to very low levels of body fat and still had my period, so I’m not worried about my fertility from that point of view. I do worry about it from an age perspective, though – I’m nearly 32. Scary.
“I’d think about freezing my eggs, but the idea of spending thousands of pounds makes me think I’ll do it when I absolutely have to – as a last port of call if I get to 35 and haven’t had children.”
Pregnancy and birth will also give Chloe an opportunity to expand her business into pre- and post-natal training, and it’s one she’s already looking forward to.
She takes her job “extremely seriously”, which is why it’s a constant source of frustration to see unqualified celebrities jumping on the health and fitness bandwagon and claiming to be experts.
“I’m a big fan of the Kardashians as an entertainment family. If you’re into beauty or fashion and you want some inspiration they’re great to follow. But them giving out specialist advice on health and fitness makes my skin crawl and my blood boil.
It’s the industry paying them to talk about it that really bothers me. And there are UK celebrities doing it, too – a lot of girls out there touting health and fitness books are not qualified. It kills me.
“The fact that somebody can fall out of a reality TV show and into my industry and take all my hard work away p**ses me right off. Do you know what a carbohydrate is?
Can you tell me what a calorie is? Can you tell me the difference between a compound and an isolated movement? No, no and no.
“It’s irresponsible and it’s unfair to those of us who are slogging our guts out to be good at our job.” And breathe! She laughs.
“I’ll have that rant probably once a month. If people want to buy into that s**t and be so dumb as to think that someone who comes off Geordie Shore and releases a fitness DVD is the best person to get them in the shape of their life, more fool them.”
Through all the ups and downs over the years, Chloe has been supported by her parents. As a family they are all incredibly close. When asked how R and J are doing, she gasps with emotion.
“Oh, better than they’ve ever been. They both stopped drinking and they look completely amazing. They take their own non-alcoholic wine everywhere, it’s hilarious. I swear to god, mentally, physically, everything, they are brilliant. They look younger. They act younger!”
While Richard is still a regular presence on screen, Judy is fully retired with no desire to ever return to television.
“She has no interest in doing anything, which I think is the best thing ever. Mum is loving being a grandma. It’s so weird saying that because she’s not a grandma in my eyes! But it’s been a new lease of life for them.”
The Madeleyisms that have made Richard such a television legend are – praise be! – still alive and kicking (he recently told Mayor of London Sadiq Khan to “stop d**king about” over knife crime).
But Chloe says he’s not looking for a permanent role – Piers can rest easy.
“He loves being a broadcaster, but he also loves the fact that he can be like: ‘No, I’m going to go to France this summer, f**k off, bye.’ And so he’s got a really good thing going now.”
That she’s made her parents proud is clearly important to her.
“Sometimes they hear me giving their friends bits of nutrition and supplement advice and they’re like: ‘Wow, you know so much!’
“It’s such a huge compliment when someone recognises you know what you’re talking about. But to know my parents are content and proud of me means the absolute world.”
Hair: Dino Pereira using Kiehl’s Since 1851 Magic Elixir
Make-up: Aimee Adams using Bare Minerals
Styling: Annie Swain
Chloe wears: body, Whyte Studio at Topshop; trainers, Reebok
