Former Kate Plus 8 star Kate Gosselin has come forward with a shocking announcement – she’s joined the contestants on Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. The show, a new boot camp survival series premiering today on Fox, will have Kate competing alongside other big names like Jamie Lynn Spears, Melanie “Mel B” Brown from The Spice Girls, and Kenya Moore from the Real Housewives of Atlanta, among others, in tests devised by special forces operatives, based directly on experiences the operatives have faced themselves.
Kate Plus 8, which ran on Discovery and TLC between 2007 and 2017, followed Kate Gosselin and her now-ex-husband Jon through raising their eight kids, including twins Mandy and Cara, now 21, and sextuplets Hannah, Collin, Alexis, Aaden, Joel, and Leah, now 18. The show, originally based around the oddity of having sextuplets in the first place, followed Kate through her divorce from Jon and the struggles of raising her eight kids on her own – but with the show now over, Kate is taking on a challenge that might be even harder than that.
Kate Gosselin, 47, has admitted that her children were her inspiration for joining Special Forces: Worlds Toughest Test, but even with that in mind, the thought of joining this intense new reality series was certainly something daunting. “I knew I was crazy going into it, but as afraid of it as I was — because I kept trying to be like, ‘No, no, I can’t do that!’ — then I’d find myself awake at night being like, But what if I could?” she told PEOPLE Magazine.
‘Kate Plus 8’ star Kate Gosselin is Inspired by Her Kids
When asked about why she would want to undertake such a grueling task, Kate admitted that she wanted to do it for the “cool mom points,” especially from her teenage boys, according to PEOPLE.
“I mean, obviously if I was in my 20s, I’d have a better chance of whipping it. But I knew, given my age, I mean let’s be real, how far could I go? I knew my mental determination could take me [far], but my physical status, I’m not physically running marathons currently. So that part was really worrying, but at the same time, just even giving it a shot I thought would bring me some cool mom points.”
Funnily enough, Kate’s experience with sextuplets is paying off in another way: she says that the experience of giving birth to six babies in one go was “a mental and physical and mental game” that she couldn’t give up on, giving her a special kind of strength she’s putting to use in Special Forces: Worlds Toughest Test.
“That’s when I learned how really you can talk yourself in or out of anything. Your brain is so much more powerful than we give it credit for. So that part, I already had a taste of having been pregnant with them and literally crying because I felt 85 but knew I couldn’t give up because it would be to their detriment really if they were born too early. So that part I knew I had clicked into a little bit and I really wanted to see how far I could take that.”
Special Forces: Worlds Toughest Test will star mother of eight Kate Gosselin alongside 15 other celebrities as they undertake what’s been described as the “toughest test of their lives.” The series is currently available on FOX and Tubi.