A rolling Moss gathers no stones

So Kate Moss is in trouble again. And no it’s not drugs this time. Or a fashion faux pas, or a run in with the paparazzi. No Ms Moss has dared to make a comment about weight. In what has been billed as a “rare online interview” (nothing Kate’s ever said has moved me or left me bedazzled by her intellect so perhaps it’s a blessing that her verbal output is minimal) she’s shared with us that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” is one of her mottos.

There’s been a somewhat predictable outcry, particularly from those concerned about the impact of these words on impressionable young women who frequent sites which laud anorexia. And look anorexia does kill people – let’s not forget that – but to lay all of this at the tiny feet of a small slim woman who is actually a pawn of sorts in a huge and hungry industry seems skewed to me.

Actually I think a lot of us have issues around food and perhaps Kate’s just helping us to come out of our foodie closets. And tabloid style television has fuelled this secret and not so secret obsession. One show puts really large people through weeks of arduous exercise and gruelling eating regimens, only to kick them off one by one because, perversely, they are not “the biggest loser”. Gillian McKeith is a food fascist of note (well she prefers the label holistic nutritionist), bringing poop analysis and other humiliations to Brits who seem to have been raised entirely on lard.

A BBC Lifestyle show asks a too thin person to swap diets with a too fat one for a week so that they develop an appreciation for each other’s challenges. A recent episode had both parties in tears, the low BMI female participant because she never ate carbs at all and was now forced to, and the clinically obese male participant because her distress made him realise just how far down the road of overweightness he had gone. 

And so it goes on. New eating disorders are sprouting up like, well, sprouts. Orthorexia is the disorder du jour, evidenced by an obsession with factors such as the nutritional content of a specific food, the provenance of the ingredients (are they organic for example?), or whether certain foods are more or less allergenic. Apparently, and ironically, this can lead to malnutrition or death. Now that’s unhealthy. Given that food programmes are now entertainment, that Oprah and Dr Oz help Americans to live longer through a revision of their diets – and examination of their poop (yes poop again) – and various other minor celebrities become major celebrities through their public weight loss efforts, we are all sucked into this global obsession with food.

And yes it is obscene that hunger stalks great swathes of the world while in other parts people are either starving themselves to look attractive or eating themselves into early graves through calorific overdoses. Or, in the case of us gay men, spending hours in the gym to achieve some kind of uber masculinity in the form of ripped abs, bulging pecs and trendy triceps.  Perhaps at this stage I need to own up the fact that the abs that decorate this blog are not mine. Oh mine are ripped alright, it’s just that the rippedness is hidden under a light layer of fat.

And yes I do have food issues, and since I’ve let the “belly issue” out of the bag let me say that I worry a lot about what I eat, how much I gym and what I look like. It is the downside of our obsession with the outer self, not helped by the insidious lookism in parts of the gay subculture. But hey it’s a small price to pay for fabulousness (not) isn’t it? And I’m human too.

Creepily, I do feel for Kate Moss – she’s in a brutal and unforgiving industry and staying thin is her bread and butter (just slipped that food metaphor in, sorry). But I disagree with her that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels – nothing tastes as good as a skinny latte girl!