Frankie Bridge reveals she felt ‘ashamed’ of her pregnant body

‘For the first time I felt so out of control of the way I looked’

Frankie Bridge on ITV's 'Lorraine', 7 February 2019 (Rex Features)

Frankie Bridge has admitted that she had felt “ashamed” and “embarrassed” about the way her body looked when she was pregnant with her first child.

The former Saturdays star opened up about her experience with motherhood during an interview with Christine Lampart on ITV’s Lorraine show, to promote her new book “GROW: Motherhood, mental health & me”.

Bridge, 32, has two sons named Parker and Carter with husband Wayne Bridge. She previously revealed her struggles with an eating disorder, anxiety and depression.

She told Lampard on Thursday morning that she found pregnancy “really difficult” and would bump into other pregnant women who would “gush about how lovely it is”.

“Obviously I could appreciate the magic of it and I was growing a baby, and seeing them in scans and feeling them kick was amazing, but when I would admit the things that I was finding hard, it was almost like I’d given them permission to go, ‘oh my goodness, I felt like that too’,” she said.

“So I really do think if we can all open up more and say the things that we’re struggling with or things that we don’t necessarily enjoy, then other women can feel like they can say it.”

Bridge added that she had “always suffered with controlled eating” when she was younger as a way of controlling how she looked, but felt as thought she lost the ability to do so when she first became pregnant.

“I assumed from what I was seeing at that time that I would just kind of have this little bump and nothing else would really change, and actually my whole body changed. For the first time I felt so out of control of the way I looked,” she said.

“And going up on stage with the rest of the girls [from The Saturdays] I found really difficult, I felt really ashamed that I’d lost control of my body, I felt embarrassed of my body and I felt like people were looking at me kind of thinking, ‘what is she doing up on stage? She shouldn’t be there’.

“I look back now and I feel really sad about that because I should have just enjoyed it, but not everybody enjoys that change and it is scary because you don’t have control.”

Bridge, who is an ambassador for mental health charity Mind, said her second pregnancy was less challenging because she was no longer performing with The Saturdays, after the band went on hiatus.

In January, the pop star told Made By Mammas podcast that she gained four stone (approximately 6.35kg) during her first pregnancy with Parker and described the experience as “horrible” for two reasons.

“One, because it was the first time I had ever gained weight and being so out of control. And two, I was very much still in the public eye. I was performing next to the girls who were all still a size eight and a size six,” she explained.

Bridge said that pregnancy for her was “more a means to an end”, because she got “the gorgeous baby at the end but I don’t enjoy the process in between”.