I was on Celeb SAS – I was starved, brainwashed and still suffer nightmares about interrogators, says boxer Shannon
CELEBRITY SAS Who Dares Win star Shannon Courtenay says she’s still l suffering nightmares from doing the show after being “starved, brainwashed and interrogated”.
The world champion boxer, 29, says she “never wants to be in the same room” as her TV interrogator Melvyn Downes – nicknamed Dilksy – again.
She claims he deliberately targeted her because of his interest in boxing and made the experience even worse.
Shannon was speaking at the launch of Precision Health Gyms with Made in Chelsea’s Alex Mytton – the “UK’s first physiology and fitness gym” – in Whitechapel.
The ex-WBA champ also says Celebrity SAS Who Dares Wins is so realistic she felt “brainwashed” into thinking she was actually IN the SAS.
Courtenay said: “The closer you get to the end; they start taking your food away. In the last three days I think we had half an apple and a half a jam sandwich.
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“You’re so wrapped up in it and it’s like being brainwashed. You actually end up believing you’re in the SAS and on the run. You don’t even feel hunger anymore.”
Talking about the horrific interrogation that’s shown on Celeb SAS’s finale tonight, Shannon said: “Apparently, the interrogators don’t watch much TV but when they were shown the line up of who was left on the show the big bald guy said: ‘I know her’, she’s a boxer and he’s a boxing fan, so he went double hard for me.
“I never want to be put in a room with that man again. I couldn’t bare to see him again or even be near him. I think I’d be sick.
“Last Sunday was the first time I’d seen the highlights for the next week and first time since I’ve seen the interrogator’s face and I felt so sick afterwards.”
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Courteney also said she would NOT recommend Celebrity SAS Who Dares Wins because the interrogations were so bad.
She added: “Unless you’ve experienced yourself [being on the show] you will never know what it’s like.
“From having a baby screaming in your ear, a pig screaming in your ear, the white noise, being dunked in water to being locked in a cage – it was just brutal.
“It’s physically and mentally draining’. Up until interrogation, I’d recommend it to anyone but no, I still wake up at night thinking about it.”
Founded by former world kickboxing champion Christian Thomson and Virgis Silinskas, Precision Health Gyms is no regular gym as it is the first in the country to offer members high-tech full body laboratory-grade testing.
This includes biomechanics, physiological, metabolic and biochemical scanning – which aims to help ‘build a precise physiological picture’ of the individual.
Precision Health Gyms partner with some of the most ground-breaking tech companies on the planet including health test provider OMNOS, metabolic testing specialists PNOE, body composition analysis experts InBody and Diers – who through its pressure-plated treadmill which take 240 images per second – are able to capture a unique functional analysis of the musculoskeletal system.
These cutting-edge methods help formulate a highly-personalised plan that delivers a detailed ‘roadmap for nutrition, exercise, lifestyle and supplementation’. Precision Health Gyms’s mantra is “test don’t guess”.