Vito Coppola was 17 when his body began silently shutting down.
He was an Italian teenager obsessed with Latin dance, the same one you now know as a star of Strictly Come Dancing. But before the spotlights and applause, there were judges telling him that his bottom was too big and his legs too thick. Those words became an eating disorder. His mother, back in Italy, began to notice that the packages of food she sent him for competitions were coming back untouched.
The breaking point came at a World Championship in Toronto: Vito collapsed halfway through a jive, without the energy to finish the dance. He returned to the family farm to recover and today, an 11-time Italian Latin American dance champion, he tells the whole story in his book ‘Love, Vito’, which goes on sale on August 27.