‘The Brady Bunch’ Alum Maureen McCormick Reveals 1 of the ‘Most Awful and Scariest Moments’ of Her Life
The Brady Bunch catapulted Maureen McCormick into television stardom. Playing the iconic girl-next-door Marcia Brady from 1969 to 1974, McCormick faced some personal obstacles in the years following the legendary sitcom.
Later in her career, McCormick joined the cast of Celebrity Fit Club and was challenged to take on a daunting task.
Maureen McCormick joins ‘Celebrity Fit Club’
In her memoir Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice, McCormick revealed that she received an invite shortly after her 50th birthday in 2006 to a reality show.
“One day a call came in from Barry Greenberg, an executive at the TV Land cable network,” McCormick recalled. “He’d received an inquiry from a producer who wanted to meet me for the MTV show Celebrity Fit Club.“
The Brady Bunch star was at first taken aback at the offer, feeling slighted about her appearance. After speaking with her husband and daughter, McCormick came to the realization that she should join the show.
“The ugly truth was, I had put on weight,” McCormick admitted. “By the time I was offered Celebrity Fit Club, my weight had climbed from 115 to 154 pounds, and my dress size increased from a four to a ten.”
A moment of truth for Marcia Brady
When McCormick signed on for the reality show, she was immediately required to reveal her weight for viewers to see.
“My most difficult task came at the start of production, when we had to get on the scale,” The Brady Bunch alum recalled. “I don’t know what it is about revealing your weight to other people, but stepping up on the pedestal for my first weigh-in was one of the most awful, and scariest, moments of my life.”
The former sitcom star saw the number on the scale as a sign of her failures, which would soon be shared on the air.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see the result,” McCormick explained. “I didn’t want anyone else to see. I might as well have been naked. Viewers were going to know at a glance that I didn’t have any self-control when it came to Baskin-Robbins chocolate mint ice cream, Famous Amos cookies, and garlic bread.”
Maureen McCormick for the win
Always feeling in the shadow of the near-perfect Marcia Brady, McCormick saw her body weight as her complete separation from her iconic character.
“I couldn’t have said why other than that this was a public declaration that I wasn’t perfect,” she wrote. “That I had problems and faults, and that I carried them around my hips and thighs. It was like divorcing myself from Marcia Brady in front of Judge Judy. People were going to see the truth, they were going to see me, the real me.”
With some self-encouragement and the support of her fellow competitors, McCormick took her step of courage onto the scale. The former sitcom star committed herself to the process and grew more confident. What McCormick shed in pounds, she gained in perspective, and ended up winning the competition.
“I’d just had one of the greatest experiences of my life on the show,” she revealed. “I didn’t have to play a character or memorize lines. All I had to do was be myself. And the darnedest thing happened – I won. And I’m not talking about the show. I won much more than Celebrity Fit Club, though losing more than 30 pounds wasn’t anything to complain about!”
