Brendan O'Connor
Katriona O’Sullivan: “I felt like a fat bride, and I still hate the wedding photos”
25 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Professor Catriona O'Sullivan, good morning.
Hello, thanks for having me.
So, Catriona, three years ago, you first sat there telling me about this little book you'd written called Poor.
Yeah.
So Poor has stayed on the bestseller list for the last three years now.
Yeah.
It sold a quarter of a million copies. It spawned a terrific sellout play. It was a memoir people will know about growing up with poverty and chaos and working through all that to become the minute university professor that you are today. So your new book is called Hungry. a biography of my body.
And it's about your relationship with your body, a body that you say in the book feels alien to you sometimes. And it's about your hunger for love, food, safety, even achievement. And then that hunger as well to be thinner, to shrink yourself, as you say. And it's so much story of what you put yourself through to kind of to feel, I suppose, enough down to getting a gastric band.
Can I say, I think you've done it again. This book is so good and so pertinent. It is very honest and it is very raw. And I'm also conscious that for you, talking about it like this is probably going to feel different to writing it. So I'll be guided by you here. If you're not comfortable with anything in the moment, OK, that's fine. We'll move on.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Katriona O'Sullivan to write her new book 'Hungry'?
One thing, literally hungry a lot of the time.
Yeah, so I grew up in a home. If you don't know my story, I grew up in a home that was marred by my parents' heroin addiction. And what that meant was I was hungry for most of my childhood. And I don't just mean for food. I was hungry for a hug, for someone to teach me I was valuable, to make me feel safe. But food hunger was a big issue in my home.
And so I start the book talking about, I suppose, how it felt to have a body that was hungry as a child and how that feeling interfered with everything.
Tell me about rich, poor and poor, poor people.
Yeah. So I it's this is not an academic term. Hopefully one day it will be. But sometimes people refer to someone who some people are working class and some people are underclass. That's the sociological term for it. But I grew up in a community that was all poor. All of us were in a council estate and everyone was struggling for money. But some of us had different values.
We had more trauma and we had less food supply. And for me, we were poor, poor. And then there was the other families that were just struggling for money, but they had love in their home. And I talk about my next door neighbours, who are these lovely little family, an Irish family, three little girls. And they had no money. Their dad drove a white van. He was a builder of some sort.
But the mam loved them and she sent them to school and she hugged them every day and she fed them. They were rich, poor. I was poor, poor. My mam didn't care if I went to school. I didn't have a dinner. in the mornings. My mum was prostituting herself and putting needles in her arms. But also, there was a lot of trauma in our house.
And I think we need to understand when we judge people and we talk about who escapes and who doesn't, I think we need to understand that some people are really on the margins. And as a little girl, I was not only... We not only had no money, but I had no food. Like, I'd go to school with an empty belly and be expected to learn like everybody else, Brendan.
And the loudest noise I heard in my head was actually the empty belly that I had. It wasn't... The quadratic equations that Mr. Singh was trying to teach us. It was my stomach telling me, please feed me.
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Chapter 3: How did Katriona's childhood experiences shape her view of her body?
So look, your dad, you make a really strong point of saying that your dad really loved you and he did give you a better start in that way than he got.
Yeah.
But equally... What kind of messaging did he give you around women's bodies?
So my dad was a philanderer. That's the word that I like to use. But my dad was really inappropriate in front of me about women. I have to say that for the kid that I was because my dad talked about women and their bodies while I was present an awful lot of the time. We were at the time then where... Page three was a big thing when I was small. Well, it seemed like a big thing.
Page three models, there was men who would ogle women in the paper. If you don't know what page three is, you're a half-naked woman on the third page of the newspaper. And my dad would ask me to look at the picture with him. And I didn't understand what was happening. I had this creeping feeling. And I'd be in the car with him and he'd be commenting on girls' bodies, women's bodies.
And he was also commenting in quite a sexual way or quite an inappropriate way for a child to... And the reason I write about that about my dad is that my dad, I suppose, magnified kind of what the society actually teaches us a lot of the time about women is that we are sexual objects for men or that we're there to please men or to look pleasing for men.
But my dad did it in a really toxic way and in a really inappropriate way. But my dad also... loved me, Brendan. And the reason I talk about my, like the book is themed around the people who influenced my body, but I had this real relationship with my dad that my dad would shine a light on me. He taught me to read. He taught me how to tie my laces.
There was this love that appeared sometime, but it was always dependent on me being a good girl, on me behaving well for him, on me being a pretty girl or a good girl. And I tried to show that, that that really impacted me then how I felt about myself in terms of my value in relationships when I became an adult.
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Chapter 4: What does Katriona mean by 'the fat-girl algorithm'?
And the good girl comes up again, yeah. And then your mum, poor Tilly, you say about her, she taught you the balance of womanhood.
Yes.
Love yourself, hate yourself.
Brendan, most women I know, and men, this is not just about women, but most women I know love and hate their bodies in the same moments. Like they can appreciate what their body's done, produce children, keeps them alive, heals them from cancer, whatever it is that we've been through. But at the same time, we'll have the thought, oh my God, is that my belly hanging over my jeans there?
Are the lines on my face showing to him? Do I look as young? Should I be smaller? Most women I know. But my mom had this sway about her. She knew she was attractive, friend. And she'd sway in front of my dad. And I'd watch him and him mesmerized by her. And it was beautiful. She had this confidence in her body. She knew that it was sexy and she was good.
But in the next breath, she'd be in the mirror pulling at her fat belly, crying. criticizing her boobs, being really critical about herself. And that was the template through which I learned about women's bodies, how she related to her body. And I think it's a really important message from my book for mothers, particularly of girls, but also boys.
It's not enough just to hide the diet and hide the conversation. We need to like our bodies, whatever they are, whatever shape or size they are, in order for us to teach our... The kids are picking up on it. The kids pick up on it. But also with my mum, and I talk about this, Brendan, I watched my mum then sell her body and like her body was a commodity for men.
And I watched these men take advantage of my mother. Like my mum didn't have, like we talk about sex work and I know this can be triggering for people listening, but I shouldn't feel ashamed of where I come from. Like my being abused and hurt as a child wasn't my responsibility.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How did societal expectations influence Katriona's body image?
You say in the book, a lot of people you know don't look like themselves anymore.
No.
So do you think, you know, any any of your friends, are they happy with their body?
I don't I don't think I know any woman who's fully happy with their body. It's funny, you know, my the person who one of the people that helps me with the book. So there's in some of the slimming worlds, there's slimming clubs, there's like there's words that we all know. So like, you know, purple snack is this is the lowest calorie drink.
That's the wafer?
Yeah, no, no, the purple Cadbury snack. I'm not advertising it, by the way. Oh, the little bar, yeah. Yeah, so like there's a low calorie, we all know what the low calorie bar is.
See, I'm already filing that away.
I know. That's a good one. I know. Pathological, yeah. But there's like silver sevens, Brendan, like if you get seven pound off in certain slimming clubs, you get a silver seven, you get a clap or a little stone. So I was chatting about this with one of my editors and she's like, oh, I've never heard of a silver seven. And I was shocked. I was like, you've never heard of it?
And this she was like, yeah, I've never joined. any uh slimming club and i was like amazed by that because most of the people i know at one way or another have tried to shrink their body and most most women i know are not happy with some elements and it might be the lines on their face the size of their lips their eyebrows or the size and shape of their bum or their belly or whatever it is.
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Chapter 6: What role did family dynamics play in Katriona's relationship with her body?
And I just thought, oh, my God, I couldn't love him anymore because he never saw. He just sees the light. I just have he just sees the light in me. And he will always say that to me. He says, when you're going to cry saying that I cry on the good things. He says, when you're not here, it's dark. You're the light.
It doesn't matter what you look like, what you're wearing, what's on your face or what isn't. It's your light that I love. And that sounds so cheesy and so woo-woo, but he genuinely means it. And he's never asked me to change. In fact, he often encourages me not to change, especially when I'm on a mission. And I talk about that in the story.
We'll come to that in a minute. Tell me about your wedding day first, so... So you're marrying Dave and this is a guy who only sees the light and happiest day of your life, presumably, or one of them. How were you feeling about yourself that day?
Oh, it was hard. Like the dread of getting married. So Dave proposed to me about five years before and we hadn't really planned a wedding. We were busy living life and we didn't have money and stuff. The crash happened. Dave's mum was meant to be getting married. She had to cancel the date. And she said to me, do you and Dave want to take the date? And it was four months away.
And I immediately thought in my head, because I just had my last baby, if I have the wedding in four months, no one can judge me for being a fat bride. Because bridehood is stress hood in terms of body. Like I met a girl the other day, Brendan. I've never met this girl the other day. She told me she's getting married at the weekend. I've never met her. She said, I love your story. I said, what?
She said, I'm getting married at the weekend. I know I'm not as small as I should be. That's the first words she said. And so like bridehood, so the stress of it. So I felt like fat bride. I didn't have a skinny body on my wedding day. I felt like I don't like the pictures. I still don't like the pictures. And it's not that I don't like what I look at because I was very beautiful.
I've always been really beautiful in my mind. I knew how bad I felt in that picture. But I will say this. When I saw Dave waiting at the end of the aisle, it went. Because he turned around and his eyes, he's just got this expressive face and he was just like, I love her. So it was like I was just in the light of him for the moment. I could see the kids there as well, our beautiful family.
So I did, and I love being married. I just didn't like being looked at and my body being judged. And the idea that I wasn't small enough was very, very, very prevalent on that day.
OK, now we're going to get into an area that I didn't, I now know a lot more about than I did before. And it's gastric bands and gastric sleeves and everything. So when and how, why did you decide to get a gastric band first?
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Chapter 7: What were the consequences of Katriona's decisions regarding weight loss surgeries?
Do you know what I mean? And I love Vogue. So I'm not saying I'm perfect and I'm fixed, but I have a moment now and that's what therapy can give us. And I think all of us deserve to give our little selves, you know, the kids, Brendan, that ran the fields and had a laugh and loved their body. I think we all need to give ourselves permission to at least try to find that person again.
And I'm giving myself permission to do that.
Do you love your body now?
No. I really appreciate it though, Brendan. I really appreciate what it's done for me. I appreciate that it breathes, that it heals. My hair is fantastic. I do my hair every day on my Instagram. I have great hair. I have a beautiful face. There's loads of parts of it. But there are times where I still feel uncomfortable in it. But I know what to do now when I have that.
One of the important things that I have to do is I have to make sure my feed, my world, the world that I live in, doesn't encourage the dislike. So I'm a regular... Blocker. I'm a regular cleaner of my of my social feed because and that includes like conversations as well with friends. So like if if a friend starts saying, should we get the lift? Should we get the stairs to work the food off?
I'm like, lads, we don't need to work the food off, you know, so I'm definitely trying to have different conversations and clean up my feed to make sure that it's not encouraging me to dislike myself. And that helps me an awful lot.
Yeah. People will often comment to people, oh, you've lost weight, you look great. Would you say anything like that?
No. And this is interesting. All of my friends are beautiful. One of my friends has lost weight recently and we were out for our regular coffee. And she said to me, we're having a conversation. She said, why do you never compliment me on my weight loss? She was really hurt. And I said, I actually think that's the least interesting thing about you.
But I'm really sorry if you think that I don't think you're beautiful. I think you're beautiful. But I actually think you've always been beautiful.
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