No regimen, no schedule, no need to be anywhere at seven in the morning carrying a training kit and a protein shake. For Ola Jordan, who had burned through calories on a Strictly Come Dancing dance floor for more than 20 years, that silence came quickly and brought company. The weight came in gradually at first, then all at once.
Since she was seventeen, Ola had been a professional dancer. She and her husband James Jordan trained for up to ten hours a day during her time on Strictly, which allowed them to eat without worrying about the repercussions. When the body is worked so hard, most things are forgiven.
After the show ended, she became pregnant, avoided exercise completely to relieve stress due to IVF, and three weeks after their daughter Ella was born in 2020, the UK went into lockdown. The series of events—a new baby, a pandemic, and James’s grief following the death of his father in 2021—seems painfully commonplace, but the combined impact on both of them was profound.
Ola had put on almost three pounds by the summer of 2022. She talked about finding it difficult to keep up with her toddler at a soft play center, and there’s a particular sadness in that picture: a woman who used to dance flawlessly in front of millions of people on television is now having trouble chasing a two-year-old across a foam mat. A friend thought she was pregnant again at a barbecue. It’s the type of moment that settles in an uncomfortable place and stays there.
A casual afternoon by their home pool produced the picture that turned everything around. When Ola saw a friend’s photo of the couple standing together in their swimwear, something clicked.
She acknowledged that she was dissatisfied with what she saw and that she needed the outside pressure of public accountability to spur her on, making the unusual and possibly courageous decision to post it publicly. The majority of the comments she got were encouraging, which may have surprised her, but it probably shouldn’t have. The majority of people either experience the emotion themselves or know someone who does.
Even by celebrity standards, what came next was honest. Ola admitted that her height and weight determined that she was clinically obese. James acknowledged that he had trouble putting on his socks. Together, they talked about a domestic life that had drifted, including couch evenings, sharing bags of minstrels, and the typical comfort food that closes the gaps left by grief and fatigue. There was a gradual accumulation of decisions made in the dark of lockdown evenings that, when seen in a summer photo, abruptly added up to something neither of them recognized. There was no dramatic moment of collapse.
More than just appearance was impacted by the weight gain. Since then, Ola has talked about how it undermined her confidence in the most intimate aspects of her marriage, such as avoiding situations where James would see her naked, retreating from social events that used to feel natural, and declining party invitations in favor of the couch. Additionally, doctors told her that if she and James wanted a second child, losing weight would increase her chances of successful IVF. That advice obviously made an impression, and it appears to have added urgency that vanity alone might not have.
The one thing they both truly knew—dancing—was the source of their recovery. The weight began to drop when combined with a regimented 1,500-calorie diet and at-home exercises, which eventually included Ella participating in the cha-cha in the living room. In the first month, Ola shed nine pounds and one stone. By January 2023, she had returned to her Strictly weight of a size eight and was openly discussing the changes it had brought about, both physically and in unexpected ways.
It’s possible that the weight gain itself—the normalcy of it, the way it happened to two people whose entire professional identity had been built on physical discipline—is the most fascinating aspect of this story rather than the weight loss at all. Life was disrupted. It seems worthwhile to keep in mind.
