At a moment in time when the world has never seemed more chaotic, unpredictable and frightening, I’m looking to celebrities with strong brands, to give me a feeling of consistency. Paul Mescal bringing his Mum to the Oscars? Delightful! A Real-Housewives spinoff sex scandal so complex that in order to follow it, I need nine tabs open on Google Chrome? Bring it on! Gwyneth Paltrow sharing a wellness routine that makes her seem less relatable and more out of touch than Marie Antoinette? Hook it to my veins!
Well, I don’t know how Gwyneth heard me, but she took me pretty literally. With an IV drip of ‘good old fashioned vitamins’ hooked to her veins, she shared her ‘wellness routine’ with podcaster Dr Will Cole on Monday, and went predictably viral. She practises intermittent fasting, eating something that ‘won’t spike [her] blood sugar’ at around midday, before treating herself to a blowout dinner of ‘vegetables’. “I love soup … I have bone broth for a lot of the days,” she said.
Here’s a multiple choice quiz: Is bone broth
That’s right, lads – it’s b! Gwyneth answered a, and perhaps it doesn’t matter that she got my silly quiz wrong! After all, it’s just a bit of fun, isn’t it? Goop is always good for a giggle!
The trouble is that I’m no longer finding it funny. I am 38 years old. I have struggled with disordered eating for over 25 years. Writing that sentence has made me cry. I am exhausted. Right at the back of my mouth, there is a molar that still feels rough against the tip of my tongue because I damaged it when I was making myself sick. There are foods I am frightened of because they take me to some dark mental places. And I’m so lucky. I’m here. I have more good days than bad days, now. I have worked so hard to learn how to nourish my body and soul, and to find a way to live that allows me to respect and celebrate food. This is largely because I’ve sourced a lot of outside help. Ruby Tandoh, Diana Henry, Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater, Lizzo, Tess Halliday, Self Esteem – these are just a few of the people who make me feel that there is so much to celebrate about being a woman with an appetite.
Usually, this would be part of my argument. We have a lot of role models to choose from. We don’t need to pick Gwyneth. Let her live her life, with her fanny candles, and her sad soupless soup. Good for her! Not for me! But right now, nothing feels usual. Ever since Kim Kardashian’s 2022 Met Gala appearance – and the breathless reporting around her ‘transformation’ and ‘dramatic weight loss’, there has been at least one news story a week about the ‘return to size zero’. This is backed up by reports from fashion month about a lack of size inclusivity on the catwalk. Then there’s Ozempic. When I Googled it, I’d forgotten that it’s made to treat diabetes (and that many people with diabetes who need it urgently can’t get it, because the demand for it as a weight loss aid is so high.) According to the internet, on Ozempic, you’re in a constant state of nausea – which often expresses itself at both ends, simultaneously – and you lose interest in food. Again, it sounds like a fairy tale curse. Not something you’d ever wish for. But the demand curve just gets steeper, as our actual curves disappear.
You might think ‘if someone wants to pay a thousand dollars a month to **** themselves inside out, in this economy, more fool them’. I can tell myself that if I were Gwyneth and had Gwyneth money, I’d be off the bone water and on the lobster and chips. But at a time when the wealth gap is widening, increasing numbers of us are barely able to afford necessities and it’s hard to buy a tomato, it seems especially problematic to make extreme weight loss aspirational. You really can be too rich and too thin. We’re scared, and we’re hungry. We don’t need a movie star influencer implying that well, we could probably be hungrier. The face of Southern Californian luxury has the voice of Mr Burns.
It’s hard to hold onto ourselves and our centres when we’re feeling especially vulnerable, and worried about the future. Those of us who have ever struggled with disordered eating – thought to be 1.25 million people in the UK, definitely at least 95 per cent of all the women I have ever met – are at risk. When we hear a message that tells us we could be thinner, better – we’re going to bring our shame, our insecurities and our inadequacies to the table and eat our hearts out.
In her newsletter We Can’t Do It Alone, the author Harriet Minter explores the troubling link between the fashion for thinness, and economic instability. She writes ‘We are designed to pick up on the prevailing trends and blend in with them…[and] Right now being in a body that you have total control over isn’t just nice to have, it’s a way of staying safe in the world.’ Are there other, better ways for us to stay safe? How can we keep our bodies and souls together, literally and figuratively?
It feels so hard, right now. I think our priority must be that we try to feed ourselves as well as we can – in terms of the food we eat, and the information we take in. Ironically, I’ve decided to treat Goop and Gwyneth’s words as the Big Mac of my online diet. I can enjoy them every so often and know that they won’t do me any harm if I occasionally indulge. However, I must remember that it won’t fill me up, it won’t satisfy me for long, and I can’t rely on it for spiritual nutrition. I’d like to live in a world where wealthy, powerful influencers understood that their words carry weight, and with great power comes great responsibility. Their ‘brand’ comes with an emotional carbon footprint that needs to be offset. For now, I’ve got to finish my bone broth. It’s delicious with a cheese sandwich.