With Christmas festivities around the corner, Nigella Lawson has championed an anti-diet philosophy and expressed concern with our “unhealthy fixation” with being thin.
In a moving interview with Australia’s Sunday Telegraph Style magazine the domestic goddess revealed her very personal reasons why.
‘My mother had an eating disorder, so I felt very strongly that I was not going to be tyrannised in that way,’ she said. ‘Also, if you've known three people you love very much die of cancer, you do not equate extreme thinness with healthiness.’
Her mother, Vanessa, died in 1985 at the age of 48, her sister, Thomasina, died in 1993 in her early thirties and her first husband, John Diamond, died in 2001 aged 47.
‘I'm my children's only parent, I'm getting older and being healthy is important to me,’ she added, referring to her two children, daughter Cosima, 21, and son Bruno, 19.
The culinary queen, who is renowned for her indulgent recipes, has made it clear that she doesn’t think eating unhealthily is a good idea, but talks about how scarring obsessive dieting can be. She says she doesn’t like the term ‘clean eating’ because she hates the implication that other food is 'dirty' and something to be ashamed of.
'Feeling that I should be in a smaller dress size would involve going against my nature in the sense of what my physique is,’ she added. ‘I would have to under eat and I think that's incredibly bad for you. 'I have an emotional relationship to food, but I don't use food as emotional ballast. If something isn't right, you can't make it right with food, but certainly it improves the quality of my life to eat well. And that, for me, is an intrinsic part of living well.’
Living well and forgetting the diets this Christmas is definitely advice we’re on board with.
By Anna Silverman