Ahead of this year’s new series of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Platinum Spas exclusively spoke to 2013 contestant Amy Willerton. We discussed the beauty pageant’s experience on the ITV show, her wellbeing routine, the importance of meditating and what advice she would give to aspiring models.

Wellbeing

Have you moved out of the UK to live in Dubai and was this for mental health purposes?

Yes, I have. I needed to get out and I love the UK and will always be home and it’s my family but in terms of how I wanted to live, it didn’t resonate with me, but even in Dubai, I’m struggling with the city and want to be in the nature and living more simply and stuff. I went to Dubai for the purposes of my daughter, and it’s balanced with her father doing what he wanted to do but also, being based in Dubai in the middle of the world is great and there are lots of opportunities. But I love England and go back all of the time.

How beneficial is yoga to your life in terms of positive wellbeing?

It’s completely life-changing. Once you start to ground a practice and start to realise your body is a roadmap to everything outside of yourself whether it’s your limitations or your traumas or joys, your body tells you everything. I’m a trained kundalini yoga trainer now so I work with energetic yoga and practice Somatics and ecstatic dance. It’s a whole new world for me and it started when I went to Ibiza after Covid and started stretching and opening my body and crazy, amazing things just started to happen the more I worked with my body and became more in tune and built a relationship with my body, so it has been a huge part of my life (for my wellbeing).

Outside of yoga, what are the most common activities you do to protect your wellbeing after a busy day?

I recently did Vipassana. It’s a 10-day meditation. There are three centres around the world and there are several in the UK and anyone can sign up. You put yourself in self-imposed prison for 10 days. When you arrive, you give them your phone, your books and personal items and you have to adhere to this routine of meditating 10 hours a day for 10 days.

They feed you, and you stay in a complex, but you’re not allowed to talk to anyone, not allowed to make eye contact with anyone or anything it is extreme. For 10 days you go completely internal and work through all of your thoughts. The credible thing about this is, during that time once you have repetitively gone through the same thoughts in your head again and again, and it’s just your story, you suddenly realise ‘I’m doing this to myself, it’s not about my environment, it’s me doing this to me because there is no other distractions’.

It allows you to see where you are creating your dramas, traumas, and own upsets and observing them before letting go. I’m a lot more in tune with my internal world to close my eyes and see how I feel because especially in England, we are raised to wonder how everyone else is feeling whereas we are told it’s selfish to ask if I am okay. It’s a life experience that has got me into more of my meditation practice so that was a reset. Every time I feel clogged, I do a cleanse. I do a five-day juice cleanse and do it at the start of each season so four times a year and I feel great.

When you do cleanses, it gives your body a break. I don’t read so much of the media right now so I don’t necessarily know where people are at but I feel like I’ve flipped a lid on everything I thought was healthy for me but instead tuned into my own body. I won’t pretend I have this perfect diet though. I go through all extremes of food from doing a week of junk food to remind myself how crap I feel off junk food and I try not to limit myself. I prefer keeping myself in surroundings where I have good influence on what I eat but I think it’s about developing a relationship with your body.

Even when it comes to meat, a few years I went vegetarian for the first time and I really didn’t miss it, I was two years without meat. But earlier this year, I got this call that it was time to start bringing meat back in again and I just followed that. My body was quite thin at the time, and I needed to have a little bit more strength in my body and I listened to that and didn’t judge it. I think for me, that approach keeps my relationship with food and my body healthy and not too serious either.

Do you use ice baths, cold plunges, hot tubs etc?

I love doing ice baths. It’s so good to keep your body feeling alive and to keep everything moving. I did a water blessing in Mexico where they tell you about our relationship with water and reminding us that we are 90% water and everything that moves through us is water. I love living near the sea, having hot baths and being near water but I am very fiery so that’s why I gravitate towards it.

How did you mentally and physically prepare for marathons?

I hate how honest I am, but I didn’t really prepare for it. I did start doing some training for it but only a month before, so I think the most I had ever run was a half marathon before running a marathon. I was not physically or mentally prepared for it however, I was super blessed because my father did the race with me, and he kept me going.

My father is an incredible athlete and was the over-65 world champion in Hawaii for an Iron Man marathon and I was there supporting him. I am really lucky to have that athletic natural ability, I’m really blessed to have inherited that and to have the support of my father. That speaks for itself to mentally prepare for anything. It’s about the right environment, the people around you and just having the mindset of what the intention is. Why are you running a marathon or putting yourself through it? As long as you have that real core intention of why you are doing it, that will push you mentally.

I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here

What was your experience like in the Jungle living on rations of food?

Being in the Jungle, I would say living on little food returns you to primal because I didn’t know when I was going to eat. We’re so reliant on supermarkets in this generation but we didn’t live like this. People used to grow their own food, had trade with different people and we were going back to our roots of our own survival primal. That’s the incredible thing about doing the jungle because you are fighting for survival and they really put your body in a state where it believes it is fighting for survival. I think that’s how they get you to do those awful challenges because normally you would be like ‘I’m not doing that’ but for me, one of my most affinitive moments in the jungle was lying in camp feeling so weak and then a brushturkey walks into camp and I was looking at it planning how I was going to kill it. I was thinking how will I be able to kill it, cook it, and eat it without people seeing? I’ve never violently killed an animal before so that’s why I’m saying it’s a real return to the primal instinct. In this day and age, if you kill a chicken, it’s so barbaric because you order it off a menu and it arrives, and we lose that connection with the process.

Is it true you get small rations of rice and beans?

You get given a small ration of rice and beans every day but not a big ration, it’s one cup of rice and one cup of beans. That’s basically enough food to keep you alive so you know you’re not going to die and then anything else is a bonus. The rice and beans become absolutely delicious after a while.

I think it’s a really healthy thing to do (with small rations of food). I’ve never truly been so hungry like that in my life before and it reminds us how lucky we are when you think of countries that don’t have access to food in that way so for me, it taught me a lot. It’s a really incredible container to learn so much about yourself and the world so I don’t think it’s as bad as it’s made out, but it was a long time ago and I remember being very hungry. Myself and Joey (Essex) would make pretend beef burgers, and I wanted to kill animals, so something clearly was getting offset but looking back, I don’t think ‘what an awful thing’ instead I think ‘wow what an incredible thing to experience at such a young age’ because I was only 21.

Did you get weighed in the camp to ensure your wellbeing was put first?

They weigh you before and after. Before I went in, I was skinny because I went straight from Miss Universe, so I was skinnier than normal at around 58 kilos when I went in and I was 52 kilos when I left. So, I lost six kilos. For a woman who is 5ft 8ins to be 52 kilos is really thin. I was the smallest I had ever been.

What was the hardest part of being on the show?

The toughest thing for me coming out of the jungle and the whole experience was after I left the show. The integration for me as someone who went on that show having not been a celebrity before was tough. I don’t think I integrated fame into my life very well. I was a pageant girl; if I had my sash and crown on then I would get attention and suddenly I couldn’t take it off. Talking to myself 10 years ago, if I was going through that process, I would want more time to integrate and understand what you want to do with that power.

These days it’s not a big deal that we have 300,000 people that we can talk to with a click of a button. That’s not a big deal anymore. You have a big opportunity to influence people, and it’s about how we want to use that tool moving forward. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t posted much online (recently) because I’ve spent a lot of time on what is it, I am telling people in the same way I am careful about what I consume. I want to be intentional with what I am sending to other people.

What were Ant and Dec like off camera?

All I remember is they got drunk with my dad. There was an afterparty and my dad and them were having a great time. I don’t know them so well, but they have always been really cool guys and are a right duo. As soon as Ant and Dec are mentioned, I just think of my dad saying, ‘I partied with Ant and Dec’.

Did you mentally prepare for a skydive on the show?

I was told I was too excited for the skydive and that I didn’t have enough fear. I think they try to throw those out who are s*** scared of heights. It’s funny because people said play the game as in you could tell the show that you were really scared of heights, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t tell them that but if I said I was really scared of heights then they probably would’ve made me skydive and thrown out of the plane. My advice for the show would be to tell them the opposite of what you are scared of. Don’t tell them your actual fears because otherwise you’re doomed. It was very much like that. They know what you’ve told them about what you are scared of so it is very likely you will find yourself in that situation if you aren’t careful. It’s a TV show ultimately and it’s a great show I love it.

What advice would you give Coleen Rooney and co ahead of the new series to protect their wellbeing on the show?

I would just really use the opportunity to connect with yourself and disconnect from everything else. We don’t get a lot of time to unplug. I would fully embrace it and that was one of the things I said to myself when I went in there I would do every challenge, I would try my best no matter how scary it was and that was what my intention was. I wanted to fully enjoy it and commit myself to it and because I made that mental promise to myself, that really pushed me to not chicken out of everything.

Even though there were challenges where you had to dunk yourself in a bowl full of fish guts, get buried with a snake, or eat this, I knew in myself that I had already made the mental decision that I was doing anything I was asked to do. You get to decide how you will approach the opportunity so I would just say, ‘are you going to ever put yourself in the jungle in this situation again’?

Modelling career

What mental challenges come with being a model?

The survival pressure and the way you look. But then again, with any job, there is always some sort of pressure. For me, it’s about maintaining self-confidence to really show up on a shoot and say, ‘I deserve to be paid’. I have had periods in my life where I have not felt as confident and sometimes, I will be thinking ‘why are they paying me’? I don’t feel good enough. That’s where some of the challenges come from.

You’d think someone like me who has had all of the self-assertion I have had in my life (would be confident) but I was Miss Universe, voted the sexiest woman, was on the cover of the magazine for 14 days in a row but no matter what the external will say, it will come down to whether I feel confident and good about myself. I can tell every woman out there that it does not matter what the world tells you but it’s how you feel inside.

For example, when I became a mother, and felt an alien in my own body and thought ‘oh my gosh, I’m going to look like this forever’. I went through such an identity crisis and then a few years later, I went to Ibiza and got healthy again. I reset my life and then I’m invited to dance in front of thousands of people at festivals. One year ago, I was a fat Netflix mum. Your external will always be reflected on what’s going on internally and that’s why people go on about meditating and the internal world.

What’s the culture like being a model, is it supportive or toxic?

Coming from a pageant background, everyone would say it must be so catty, but I found actually, the place I found that was the least bitchy with women was in pageants because a lot of the girls have self-confidence, and they are putting in that effort to feel self-confident.

They’re showing up for themselves with what they eat, and how they exercise, and they have that assertion. I find that the only time that women get upset is when they don’t feel good inside themselves. Of course, you will then hate that girl who looks amazing because you feel so s*** inside. That’s what I suffered when I did these things because I then reflected that to other people, and they didn’t like me for it. That made me then think, is there something wrong with me? That’s not the right thing to do. It’s just asking yourself the question, how do I feel about me and then you can make your own decisions from there.

What advice would you give to women who want to get into modelling?

AM: The industry has changed a lot. There are so many girls who do it by influencing and post on social media or do a reality show or go with an agency, but it depends on what you want to do. When I first started, I knew I wanted to change my stars and break out of my mundane life in Bristol where I worked at a shop. There’s nothing wrong with working in a shop, but I knew in my heart that I wanted to do other things. Pageants was my route, and I would highly recommend it to anyone because it’s not just about how you look, you have to find a cause that you care about, speak and know your stuff, and doing your research when answering questions.

When I was at Miss Universe, they asked do I believe in stem cell research. If I was only good at doing my eyeline then how on Earth would I answer that question? It’s about being somebody who can represent women.

It’s difficult being a female because of the female body but if I was a hot young girl I would just say utilise the female body and find what you want to do whether that’s model campaigns or travel on Instagram. Ask yourself what life you want to live and just follow through from there.  

Image credit: Amy Willerton Instagram

Sarah Watkins
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