Louise flogs diets

Having done her stint "trying out" being size zero last year, it's something of a surprise to discover she's flogging diets for Boots.

Louise is fronting up a Body Mass Index campaign for the store:

The 'Know Your Figure' campaign aims to educate Brits on how to work out the healthy weight range for their individual height and frame, rather than focusing on counting pounds and inches.

Although, erm, body mass index is discovered by counting pounds and inches and doing some maths with them. And the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition has some misgivings about the body mass index in the first place. And we're not sure that merely shifting the focus from pounds and ounces to BMI figures actually does anything very much about dealing with the problems which lead to men and women starving themselves to death, does it?

Slim pickings for Lily Allen

Lily Allen's well-known for her attacks on size zero, the fashion industry and those magazines whose choices of cover girl reinforce the idea that unless you're slim, you're not worth anything.

Here, for example, she's doing just that in Manchester:



So, erm, who's on the cover of Gq "showing off her new slimline figure"? Could it be Lily Allen?

Chico has something important to say

In all the debate surrounding the concept of "size zero" models, one voice has remained silent. But no longer: Chico will remain silent no longer.

With perhaps the exception of To Me, To You: The Chuckle Brothers explain Middle Eastern boundaries, it's hard to come up with a meeting of subject so complex with an intellect so lacking. Trying to cope with the complex issues of the demands of the fashion industry as an aspiration-driven industry, the power of the male gaze, the idealisation of the impossible, the use of food as a means of control and the projection of self-image, Chico's response seems to be "ooh, you wanna girl you can grab hold of":

"In my opinion these women are the epitomy of womanhood. Marilyn Monroe was a size 16, and all the other women have this hourglass figure."

He said: "I went on the net and started going into it, and there are models dying, people starving, so I didn't want to concentrate on the problem. I wanted to concentrate on the solution, so size zero's gotta go.

"Cos, you know, us men like them swervy, curvy and shaped like an hourglass."

Unbelievably, the lyrics manage to make Mika's vapid and patronising Big Girl seem like The Beauty Myth:

"Size zero's gotta go, give me Marilyn Monroe, J.Lo, Beyonce got the flow"

Ah, yes. Why starve yourself to death when instead you could aspire to be like Marilyn Monroe and take the more proactive route of taking an overdose instead. Well done, Chico.

Away from his new-found interest in feminist politics, Chico has also been developing his skills as a raconteur, presumably to fill the shoes of the recently-deceased Ned Sherrin:

"It was really funny, we were at the Cannes Film Festival, and on one side there was this guy walking around with a bucket selling roses, and this other guy got the whole bucket and had it sent over to Dannii Minogue.

"So, I said to the guy, 'Do you mind if I take one?'

"She looked over at me and... it was just one of those crazy Chico moments."

It's funny, something surprisingly similar once happened to Peter Ustinov. He once mistook 'a rambling tale in which nothing much happened' for 'a witty anecdote'; however, he at least had the wit to append an ending which rescued the tale.

"I'm full of contradictions - I'm a human": Ditto finds a get out

Beth Ditto's been sharing her poorly-thought-out politics with Radio One, but does at least seem to have realised that very little of what she says actually makes any sense. So, she's come up with a cover-all get-out:

I'm full of contradictions - I'm a human.

Well, yes. On the other hand, saying one thing and doing another could suggest another word beginning with 'h', too, couldn't it?

Beth starts by telling us how you wouldn't know how she suffers:

I think what makes me unhappy is how unhappy people are with me. If you're not big you really cannot possibly understand. You can be dead, you could be a drug addict as long as you're not fat. And I think that's so absurd.

If you are big you cannot possibly understand. Yeah, Martin Luther King, you think you're so hard done-by. Matthew Shepard? You had it easy; you don't know discrimination. Lots of people are bullied and picked on for different reasons, Beth, and to suggest that being bigger than other people is not only so much worse than any other bullying flashpoint is a little presumptive, and to claim that smaller people would be incapable of empathising with you is insulting.

Oh, and to suggest that the dead get treated better than the fat is insane - unless nightclubs in the US are markedly different to the UK, I've never heard of bouncers going down the queue picking out the corpses to let them in ahead of everyone else, for example.

The trouble is, of course, that at heart Ditto has an important point - society does treat people of all non-standard body types pretty badly; the constant stream of government reports and Tonight With Trevor McDonalds that focus on obesity, as if it must be a character fault rather than a blanket term covering a range of causes and lifestyles. Ditto could be a powerful voice calling down this - instead, we get "the dead get a better deal".

When I was a kid I had weird idols. I was really into Miss Piggy - she was extremely girly and extremely tough.

I feel like when I was a kid it was just so different. At least you had Cyndi Lauper who totally looked so weird and now it's so Hollywood Paris Hilton. It's a joke.

Beth has clearly been getting good feedback on the Miss Piggy anecdote, and will be using it for the foreseeable future. But was Piggy a great role model?

Yes, she was girly, and tough. On the other hand, she was vain, shallow and self-obsessed and in constant need of male approval to validate her. Added to that, her only response to people with a different point of view was to go "hiiiiii-yaaaa" and hit them, which hardly speaks of a great intellectual powerhouse.

And to suggest that back in the day "you had Cyndi Lauper but now it's Paris Hilton" is a bit of a stretch, too, as if the late 80s were some sort of feninist Eden from which we've fallen. Cyndi Lauper co-existed with Baywatch and, surely, Gwen Steffani isn't a million-miles away from Lauperesque "mainstream pop dressed up as slightly kooky" stylings?

We said no to Top Shop - it was really important for me not to take money that they offered, not to take the bait and be sure and strong in myself. But the thing is I'd still wear Top Shop. I'm full of contradictions - I'm a human.

Well, yes. And you're working with one of their designers, which suggests a little more than "contradiction".

It's so obvious but so deep about our culture, and what it says about women and their worth in the world.

To be a zero and like, that is your ultimate goal - not to be smart, or appreciated, or be an amazing artist, or be an amazing nurse or doctor or lawyer.

The biggest thing in your world is to be nothing - I think that is so intense. How about getting rid of the zero and putting a number to that, even if it's a small number? People are naturally small.

Now, here there's actually a good point there - the idea of aspiration to zero is a strange one; a wish to disappear completely which keys in to some motivation that some anorexics talk about.

But if you're worried about people killing themselves inspired by catwalks, isn't "changing the number" of size zero to some whole number a little odd? The eye-catching "zero" gave a hook on which a lot of the reaction to super-thin models could be hung - would headlines talking about "Girls starving themselves to get to size four" have created such a reaction? - and, surely, an unhealthy bodyshape is an unhealthy bodyshape regardless of what you call it; calling it something warmer might actually be an encouragement and endorsement?

Oh... and "people are naturally small", are they, Beth? Does that mean larger people are, in some way, unnatural? You clearly have no idea how larger people suffer, young lady. Treated worse than the dead, they are.

Oh, no, hang on - apparently people aren't "naturally small" after all:

Some people are just really big, some people are short, some people are tall, some people have blue eyes, some people are completely blind - that's the real world.

But what people want to tell you is that the real world is harsh and cruel and the reality is that if you're fat and ugly no one will ever like you.

That's not true - that's not reality. Real life is your skin, your flesh, your heart, your blood, walking down the street. That's real life.

We're not quite sure what this means - it sounds a little bit like one of those pointless cod-philosophical waffle-burps that Mohinder does at the start of Heroes ("When we evolve, change comes suddenly. But a slow evolution does not mean that the door must always be closed to the instant alteration - for, in the blink of an eye, everything can be altered, and yet remain exactly the same..."). Ditto suggested at the start of the interview that life being larger is cold and harsh, but now she seems to be suggesting that it isn't. And if "people" will tell you that the real world is harsh and cruel and nobody will ever like you, but that isn't the real world, then who are the people telling you you're shit? Are they made-up?

But really, the saddest part of the rambling quote is this:

"[I]f you're fat and ugly no one will ever like you"

Even Beth yanks together 'fat' and 'ugly', as if they're synonyms. That's quite heartbreaking.

KT Tunstall jumps on women's bodies

"Shoelaces with big boobs" is how KT Tunstall thinks of the unhealthy Heat magazine body archetype:

I don't know any guys who want to go out with a shoelace with big boobs. All the guys I know like girls who look like women.

"It's very twisted that women are being bombarded with the idea that this is what they should look like.

"You're left feeling inadequate and with a general sense of low self-confidence.

"There's nothing wrong with a young person wanting to be famous and rich through doing something they're passionate about but it seems to be breeding this desire in younger people to get very, very famous and rich in anyway they possibly can."

We're not entirely sure we follow her morality here: is there a problem if you're passionate about making yourself look like a big-breasted stick? If it's okay to want to be rich, but not very, very rich, where is the cut-off point where richness becomes wrong.

Tunstall, of course, blames television:

"TV firms don't seem to have any standards about what they're pumping out for young people to watch."

"It's really fucked up.

"I don't have a television any more because reality TV just made me sick.

"It's very addictive. It hooks you in and you end up watching shit for hours."

Curious that "reality TV" makes her "sick" but she watches it for "hours" - presumably she'd angled her telly so she could see it from the bathroom. But while it's brave of KT to thjrow out her TV, if she was really that annoyed at what TV companies are doing, shouldn't she refuse to appear on networks which "pump out" these fucked up programmes? And, indeed, request her record company stops funding them by advertising her record in their commercial breaks? And ban all those reality TV shows which lob "Suddenly I See" on any package featuring a "beautiful girl"?

Or does her outrage only come into force when she's not on the receiving end of a benefit?

Beth Ditto naked statement

This week's NME features Beth Ditto as naked as Avril Lavigne on the cover. For confused but well-intentioned reasons. Those of you with long memories will recall the last time a semi-naked woman was on the front of the NME, it was Lesley Rankine and Silverfish, who were in turn parodying the Polly Jean Harvey cover from a few weeks before. PJ and Beth Ditto were both on the cover as a riposte to traditional ideas of female beauty and societal nomrs - both had hairy armpits, for example.

The trouble is, it's all a bit muddled. Because NME, for all its other faults, doesn't usually have FHM-style covers, so the value of putting Ditto on the front, without pants, is a little lost. Kate Jackson, it's fairly safe to say, hasn't been lined up to slip out of her corset for the next Long Blondes piece, because that would bring a stream of letters calling them for trying to flog magazines with sexist pictures. Likewise, the Twang don't turn up with only a well-positioned tree to preserve their modesty.

So, is NME they saying it's okay for Beth to be on the front nude, because she isn't 'conventionally attractive'? And if that is the case, isn't that simply endorsing the idea of there being 'conventionally attractive' in the first place?

Or does the paper feel that a naked Beth Ditto is, from its reader's point of view, every bit as desirable as, say, a naked Amy Winehouse? In which case, isn't it a little bit Felix Dennis to be selling music magazines with female flesh?

Well meaning, but not thought through.

Which is probably more than you can say for Beth's thoughts in the interview, where she places the blame for women with eating disorders on, erm, gay men:

“If there’s anyone to blame for size zero, it’s not women.

“Blame gay men who work in the fashion industry who want these women as dolls.

“Men don’t know what it feels like to be a woman and be expected to look a particular way. The Beckhams are part of the machine; Paris Hilton is part of the machine.

“There’s that thing Paris Hilton said about Lindsay Lohan – ‘You’re poor, ugly and fat’.

“It’s always women who are victims.”

Isn't this just a tiny bit oversimplistic? After all, a large number of the people who run the fashion industry aren't "gay men" but straight, hyper-capitalist women; the magazines which run fuelled entirely on "celebrity fat bits" and "who's eaten a doughnut" aren't aimed at gay men, but are hoovered up by women; with the fastest rising incidence of eating disorders amongst young men, the "men don't know how it feels" schtick is outmoded and plain wrong; and eating disorders are anyway about far more complex influences than Paris Hilton's clothing range.

Still, you know who isn't to blame? Kate Moss. Before Christmas, of course, Kate Moss was part of the problem, but since then, she's become chums with Beth:

“I spent one night talking to Kate and she said the most amazing things about bodies.

“I didn’t think I was going to like her, but she said, ‘Do you know what I hate, Beth? When people tell my big girlfriends, ‘You have a beautiful face . . .’

“That’s a really radical concept.”

Kate Moss' genuine concern for people who aren't stick thin can be seen in the plus size range of clothes she hasn't designed for Top Shop. To us, it sounds like Moss managed to get away with patronising Ditto without Beth realising it - could that quote have been any more "some of my friends are black"? - but even if Beth did get it, she'd probably have assumed it was an evil, evil gay man throwing his voice.

Lily Allen confuses self with Beth Ditto

Considering that last night Lily Allen was saying she didn't have the time for worrying about Cheryl Tweedy no more, she's spent a lot of time talking to the Mirror about her. The trouble is that Allen is now trying to remake a showbiz-glitz spat into something more serious. She's fighting for women with eating disorders:

"There's nothing wrong with the way I look. I'm not overweight. I'm just not really, really thin.

"I don't feel that I over-eat, I'm just not someone who wants to live on a diet.

"And I haven't got time to go to the gym for 90 minutes every day.

"You see Girls Aloud in their skimpy outfits - that's the only image of women we ever see - so you start to assume that that's the correct way of looking and actually it isn't.

"There are a lot of young girls up and down the country still sticking their fingers down their throats and not eating anything.

"I've never had any eating disorders but I've had lots of friends who have and I think it's really sad.

"I'd rather encourage people who are reading all this stuff in the newspapers and magazines that they shouldn't feel bad about themselves. Everyone looks fine.

"What people like Cheryl Tweedy say isn't important.

"As far as I was concerned," says Lily, "I was trying to do something positive 9at New Look], you know, promote women of a larger size and make people feel better about their physical appearance."

All very laudable. Although, as Allen says, she's not overweight - she's not even chubby, so it's just as (if not more) dangerous for a woman of a normal body size to keep telling the media that she represents a "larger" body size - because most girls know the stick-thin look is unhealthy, but if you're comparing yourself to Allen, and she's saying she's chunky - what hope do you have?

And, if Allen is so empowering, how many of the dresses in her New Look range will fit a girl size 16 or above?

And to the point: Tweedy didn't call you fat - she said you looked like a tranny. Different thing entirely.

Knightly: I'd rather be a Ditto than a pipe

Apparently, Kiera Knightley really, really wants to have a body like Beth Ditto's, but it's just medically not possible. She even asked a doctor how she could go about remaking herself as a ditto of Ditto:

'I went to the doctor to be checked out and asked him what I could do to put on weight. He told me that for someone of my body type to get to a size 12, I would have to eat a lot of shit food, stop exercising and drink loads.

'Basically, my body type is naturally thin. There is nothing I can do about it.'

Which is odd, because we can't quite believe (a) that anybody is naturally that thin, or that (b) anyone would have to ask a doctor how to get fat - what Kiera seems to be saying is that she's surprised that medical opinion is that to have a body with three dimensions, you have to eat food. What did she ask, exactly? "Is there a reverse on the liposuction machine?"

Girls Aloud not thin, just wearing tight clothes

Sunsilk's new Girls Aloud advertising campaign has been condemned by eating disorders charity b-eat:

A spokesman from eating disorders' help group Beat said fans could be encouraged to copy the skinny look: "They look unnaturally thin - they look like Barbie dolls."

Polydor, on behalf of the band, say this is rubbish:

But a spokesman for their record label Polydor told the Daily Mail: "The girls are all perfectly healthy and are all different shapes and sizes.

"They have always spoken about and promoted healthy eating habits."

All shapes and sizes? You'd stump a pub quiz audience by asking "what is the name of the overweight member of Girls Aloud", wouldn't you?

Still, the band have done their bit to promote eating, if not healthy eating. Or, at least, they've been in an advert for crisps. What more can they do?

Meanwhile, Unilever - makers of Sunsilk - are insisting that far from being dangerously underweight, they're just wearing clingy clothes:

And a spokesman for Unilever, who make Sunsilk products, added: "The girls were wearing strong elasticated waist belts with elasticated black bodystocking-style skirts."

What - every time they go out?

Lily Allen: The responsible face of fashion

Because Lily Allen can't nip out for a coffee without telling everyone how much better she is than everyone else, she's turning her shabby New Look 'clothing range' into a war of blahs with Kate Moss:

"I like what New Look are doing and I like what they are about.

"They have responsible role models like me and Drew Barrymore and they're very conscious of having positive body images and promoting positive women.

"Unlike Kate Moss and that fucking billionaire who's thrown a load of money at her so we get to see what her wardrobe is like. It's madness."

We suspect that's Philip Green who's feeling Allen's tongue there. But are New Look really "promoting positive women"? Why, then, do their sizes stop at 14, forcing anyone larger to buy from a really stunted (and, frankly, hideous) "different" range? In what way is that different from Top Shop's policy?

Someone from Lily's team tries to make this sound less like sour grapes at landing a much smaller deal with a less prominent store, and more like some sort of battle:

"Lily can't stand the way Kate Moss is put on a pedestal and held up as this amazing role model. Here's a woman who was caught taking cocaine, is going out with a crackhead junkie and is still feted as the queen of cool. At least Lily is straight talking and honest about who she is.

"She's also totally against size zero models, she wants to promote healthy body images. She wants to say to young girls, 'Be happy the way you are and don't try to be like these scrawny girls.'"

Hmmm. Another celeb collection at New Look - the one modelled by Drew Barrymore, in fact - is Gold by Giles Deacon. While it's great that Giles chose a slightly less thin model for his High Street store, this on the left is one of his London Fashion Week creations. Hardly looks like she enjoys a good meal, does she? Doubtless Lily will soon be piping up on New Look giving large sums to designers like Giles who use painfully thin models. Or perhaps not.

Next week, H from Steps cuts off a leg to investigate ramps outside libraries

Across 90 minutes of prime-time ITV last night, Louise Redknapp "investigated" the increasing incidence of eating disorders amongst young people driven by size zero by... going on a crash diet to try and become size zero.

Did anyone read the proposal twice? Investigating an illness by making yourself intentionally ill? Turning self-abuse into a prime-time spectator sport?

Did Louise not stop, when meeting girls being treated for anorexia, and think "maybe my approach of deliberately aping what they cannot control is a little ill-advised?" Did she not watch the rushes of her meeting with Mel C - someone who has had eating disorders for real - and notice that starting with an "I'm a little bit hungry" might be a jarring note?

The intentions - a Down To Size Nowt In Paris and London Fashion Weeks - were honorable, and there was no questioning Louise's passion or involvement. But have we really come to the stage where ITV so undervalues its audience that it thinks they might not get that starving yourself to death to fit someone else's idea of looking good is a bad thing, unless they have a celebrity act out for us? We don't need a sugar-free, low-calorie lolly to suck.

You make me feel naked, undressing me with your eyes

Louise ThatUsedToBeInEternal has decided the "size zero" hoohah is the perfect opportunity to bring her TV presenting career back from the digital channels ("is something calling out for proper investigation") and so is, erm, going on a diet to reach size zero for ITV1.

Of course, the idea is to tell everyone how terrible it is, which she almost does, too:

“But towards the end I remember thinking, ‘It’s kind of nice to feel your jeans loosening.’ Oh my God, it felt pretty good. It was the first time I could wear skinny jeans and flat shoes and not feel fat.

“At that point I actually liked my body better, which is frightening.

Psst... Louise, it's meant to be a moral crusade...

"But my face and neck looked gaunt and, anyway, I couldn’t have maintained it. I felt like crap.

Simultaneously feeling like crap and pretty good, then. Thanks for that insight.

Last night, ITV was railing against Pro-Ana sites; now, it's about to run a programme which is effectively a zero-plan diet:

During the diet, Louise survived on veg, oats, water and omelettes — fewer than 800 calories a day compared to the 2,000 she needed. She also ran or cycled three miles a day and worked out.

So, what has all this taught Louise? Erm...

“I’ve got to be honest and say that if I did a photoshoot now I’d still expect things about the pictures to be touched up, People wouldn’t want to look at you with all your dark circles under your eyes and your patchy skin.

“And I think that’s fine — as long as we talk about it and don’t cover it up. Girls just need to know that we don’t really look like that.”

Oh. Right. So it's fine to cover up, providing you don't cover up? Isn't that a little like not having your cake, and not eating it?

Posh fights the size zero tyranny

Victoria Beckham has announced she intends to do something about all the images of "size zero" models in the papers, by hiring "curvy girls" to prance about in her new jeans range.

Presumably Victoria sees this as being like a carbon offset scheme - every time she appears in her role as spokesperson for avoiding swallowing, she'll pay for a picture of someone with a bit of flesh elsewhere to balance it out.

The trouble is, this is Posh's idea of "curvy" - Daniella Sarahbya, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Sarahbya is now on the Beckham payroll.

Is it just us, or is suggesting that Sarahbya is a "more normal" bodyshape just as bad for women's self-image as running pictures of ill women in fashion magazines? Indeed, isn't it just a little bit worse?