Who wants a body like a celebrity?

Have you seen the lengths some celebrities will go in their persuit of fame?
Have you seen the diets they will suffer, the fitness regimes they will punish their bodies with, the surgery they will inflict upon their tiny frames?

I know if you’re under the constant glare of the spotlight you need to keep up appearances.
Can you imagine a bank of photographers decending on you the day you decide to wear your oldest and baggiest joggers to the supermarket?
Or them catching the day you break out in filthy rotten spots all over your chin?
Or catching you on a ‘fat’ day when you decide it’s just easier to wear other half’s jumper that’s too big for him and be done with it.

Maybe that’s the incentive some of us need to spur us into action? How about I send a couple of Paparazzi around to your house DW and have them snap you eating something unsavoury then post it on the front page of your local paper with your mouth wide open just about to take a gargantuan bite!

I understand that their bodies are their ‘job’ so to speak and gaining weight/losing boobage/gaining a gut can mean the difference between starring alongside George Clooney or George Hamilton, but some of the bizarre faddy diets and punishing exercise regimes they queue up to try sometimes beggar belief.
Just look at Madonna. She looks A M A Z I N G, but at what cost?

And the trouble with all of those stars telling us how they achieved their washboard stomach or their impossibly lithe legs or their perfectly toned upper arms or breasts so perfectly erect it looks like they have their own scaffolding in place, is that it sends us mere mortals totally the wrong message.
We don’t have an army of acolytes pandering to our every need, or a glossy magazines throwing money at us.
We have to do it the hard way.

And the $6 million question is, is what they are trying to achieve that attractive anyway?

In our pursuit to feel better about our bodies are we aiming for the perfection they are touting?
Do we lose our muffin top, only to see a picture of Victoria Beckham looking impossibly thin and impossibly pneumatic and think ’sure I’ve done well, but I could do a bit more’.

Or do you tone up your love handles, only to see Hugh Jackman in the movie Australia and think ‘ye gods’ (or was that just me?)

When I was in my twenties I didn’t like my body.
I was curvy with big boobs and I wasn’t tall enough.
I flitted between a UK size 10 and 12 and thought I was overweight and dumpy and wanted to wear everything that didn’t suit my body shape.

Bwaaaahhhaaaa. I look back at those days now and howl with laughter – for the love of god, I wish I had that figure now.
I wish I had appreciated that figure back then.

A while back Dave Fowler posted a piece entitled ‘Nigella Lawson is gorgeous’ (she’s a British TV chef and greatly adored by men the length and breadth of the country – one commenter labelled her fondly as the ”Queen of Gastroporn”!).
Anyway, she is a British size 16, very curvy and all woman. She would probably been seen as vastly overweight by many of the size 10 TV stars who vie for attention and yet there she is, loved and droolled over by many.

So I’ve given myself a bit of a talking to and now have a vision in my head of what I want to achieve.
I’m not going to beat myself up for not having a belly you can bounce a ball on or the waistline I had in my 20s.
I just want to feel comfortable in me. 

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Are you really a size 12/14/16/18?

This is a subject that really winds me up.

How can I go into one shop and fit comfortably into a pair of size 12 jeans and yet I go into the shop next door and I can bearly negotiate the waistband over my thighs?
What, did I put on half a stone walking from one shop to the next?
Did some fat genie manage to slap a couple of layers of blubber around my waistline when I wasn’t looking?

I cannot fathom why High Street shops haven’t cottoned on to this before now: when a woman comes into your store and finds her usual size only fits a waif-like teen with no bust and minimal curves SHE WILL HATE YOUR STORE FOREVER!

It is a fact of life that women seem to be governed by their clothes size.
Celebrities seem to covet that holy grail of the American size zero and if some minor star is being interviewed in a magazine about their “amazing weight loss” the first thing you’re told is how they went from “a hefty size 14, down to a super slim 10″.

A hefty size 14? That is going to make everyone who is a 14 or above feel like the size of a cow.

And if you’re naturally a UK size 8 or below you’re labelled ‘annorexic’, ‘unwell’ or (this was once levelled at a perfectly healthy but very slim woman I did a feature on in my former life as a features editor) ‘a f***ing disgrace’.

Hmm, I’ve gone off the boil on a bit of a rant there.

So, imagine you’re in a shop looking for a pair of jeans and you’re usually a size 14.
You try their size 14s on and they’re so tight you’re having trouble doing them up. Then – oh no – you can’t actually get them off again.
After struggling, breaking a nail, going all red in the face and then catching your reflection in the mirror do you go back out into the store and get a size 16?
Do you buffalo – you stalk out of that store swearing you’ll never shop there again because there is “no bloody way I’m a size 16!”

Yes, I KNOW it’s ridiculous and you should just buy the size that fits and what does it matter if it’s a 6 or a 16? I know there will be men reading this and thinking ‘what the?’.
But it’s Woman Nature. We know it’s ridiculous but psychologically we buy into the fact that we must fit a certain size and we WILL NOT venture out the other side of it.

All of which is my way of telling you that my clothes are a little looser. And I have had to start wearing a belt with my work trousers. And it makes me want to jump up and down a lot.
It has made me SO tempted to run out and buy buy buy something new. But I just know that I’ll get all disheartened and probably be rude to someone in the fitting rooms and then get upset and come home and eat a chocolate digestive. Or seven.

So instead, I emptied the contents of my wardrobe onto my bed and sorted it out into 3 sections:

1. Stuff I can wear now

2. Stuff I can wear in the very near future

3. Stuff that when I can wear it I will post of picture of me on here in just my underwear.

NOTE: Those trousers in the picture were my pulling trousers. In my pre-married days, those trousers did me proud. I loved them so much I had two pairs! I wore them on my hen night (not as pulling trousers, obviously!) and now they just sit there in my wardrobe as a grim reminder of, well, of how hot I used to be!

I want to wear those trousers again!

Tara

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Do you need to be skinny to be successful?

Like it or loathe it, celebrity culture has a massive impact on our everyday lives.

When the likes of Victoria Beckham, or Katie Holmes, or J-Lo appear perfectly groomed and squeezed into a pair of uber skinny jeans a few weeks after giving birth, us mums can’t help but feel a little peeved.

Sure we all know it’s totally ridiculous and that those women who appear in glossy magazines a matter of weeks after giving birth claiming that breastfeeding or motherhood or some other mystical force that was never bestowed on us mere mortals has magically made them shed every ounce of baby weight, are well, they are lying.

We all know that. And yet we still kick ourselves and berate ourselves that we should be able to do that too. I’m sure I could look like I’d just stepped off the pages of Hello magazine if I had a lipo surgeon on speed dial, a personal chef and my own in-house spray tan booth.

And it’s not just the new mums with a baby belly to shed who have been setting this frightening trend.

Shockingly, it seems you cannot be a rising star these days unless you shed every ounce of fat and – more shockingly – become ‘talk about’ thin. Sometimes skeletal, unhealthily thin.

It seems the old saying: “You can never be too rich, or too skinny” is the mantra of many these days.

America’s current comedy darling Tina Fey claims she only found fame after losing 30lb on a WeightWatchers programme.
She wasn’t even that heavy before, but once she shifted those pounds suddenly the world sat up and took notice.

Then there is Victoria Beckham who is so thin now it is said she can fit into a pair of boys’ age 8 jeans.
And she has never been more revered.

Actress Kiera Knightly’s star has rose massively and very quickly – and so has exposure of her jutting bones and painfully thin frame.

Famously, an agent told aspiring actress Jennifer Aniston to shed 30lb, which she did and landed the part of Rachel in Friends.

In England, footballer’s wife of the moment Cheryl Cole can do no wrong. She recently went through the trauma of discovering her famous hubby had cheated on her and the stress make her drop weight at an alarming rate.

And don’t even get me started on the car crash that is Amy Winehouse.

Another incident worth note is in the Sex and the City movie – which I LOVED – when Samantha Jones’ ’shocking’ weight gain is met with gasps of utter shock from her close buddies. Was I the only one sitting in the movie theatre thinking ’so bloody what?’ She walks in having gained about 14lbs and her ‘friends’ all act like she’s gone up 3 dress sizes.
What message does this send to women everywhere?

Sure, I want to be slimmer, but I don’t want my collarbones to show and I don’t want to lose my curves.
Does this mean I’m never going to get anywhere in life?
Does this make me a failure because I carry a bit of meat on my bones?

All these too-skinny-for-their-own-good celebrities are wearing a bit thin now (sorry!).
The tyrany of thinness has gone too far.

Am I over reacting or are we being subjected to an unhealthy picture of perfection.
And what about the young girls for whom these women are role models?
What do you think?

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