Chastity Bono Joins Celebrity Fit Club  11/5/05

Cher's heavyweight daughter Chastity Bono signed up for the new series of reality TV weight loss show Celebrity Fit Club because she's sick of feeling like an outsider in her native Los Angeles.

The 200-pound-plus gay rights activist and writer agreed to take part in the upcoming third series of the VH1 show - and shed the pounds in front of US TV viewers - after realizing she felt miserable socializing with fit and thin Angelinos.

She says, "I live in Los Angeles... and you do feel kind of separate and apart when you're overweight in this town.

"It's not other people doing it. I have eyes, I see what the standard is in this town. I don't fit it, so I'm not 100 per cent comfortable.

"I don't need to be skinny in order to be comfortable, I just need to be healthy."

Bono, who was shocked to learn her body has a whopping 42 per cent fat content at the recent Celebrity Fit Club weigh-in, admits she'd love to look like her mother, and blames her late father Sonny Bono's genes for landing her with a weight problem.

She explains, "If you look at early Sonny & Cher, like, I Got You Babe in the mid-60s, he was a little chubby... and then he lost a lot of weight before The Sonny & Cher Show."