Raven-Symoné had a breast reduction when she was a teenager

Speaking on her 'Tea Time' podcast, she told her wife Miranda Maday: "I had my first breast reduction at 15. It was traumatic. I was a triple D all the way down to a B.

"Someone said I needed to do it in order to get a show."

But the 'Cheetah Girls' star - who appeared in the Broadway musical 'Sister Act' for a brief stint following her early stardom and then became a panellist on 'The View for a number of years before returning to Disney with 'Raven's Home' in 2017 - has now learned to "embrace" her body in a way she couldn't when she was younger.

She said: "There's this beautiful embracing of the body now that I didn't get as a young girl."

It was recently alleged that when Raven was in the middle of shooting her supernatural sitcom - which originally ran from 2003 until 2007 - Disney bosses decided to make her appear "thinner" with CGI.

When her weight fluctuated in her later teenage years, co-producer and writer Dava Savel has claimed show bosses "handled it in really bad ways".

In the book 'Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire', Sevel said: "Disney Channel was going crazy about it.

"And they handled it in really bad ways. But it was never to her face."

Sources in the book allege that one incident occurred in season two episode 'That's So Not Raven', which saw another model picked for a runway show over Raven because of her slimmer frame.

The episode saw the character Raven try a range of diets before realising she is perfect jut as she is, and then sending a message of body positivity when she walked the runway at the end.

However, the book's author Ashley Spencer writes that "multiple people involved in the episode" claimed a Disney Channel ex ecutive told the visual effects team to make Raven thinner in the closing scenes.