Melanie Chisholm, the former Spice Girl Mel C, dates her past struggle with eating disorders and depression back to an incident at a Brit awards ceremony, she reveals on Desert Island Discs on 23 February.
In 1996, before the girl group was officially launched, Chisholm was almost chucked out of the Spice Girls for unruly behaviour, following “a scuffle between me and Victoria” that she has only recently admitted to.
Continue reading...Greta Thunberg’s extraordinary transformation from a near-mute 11-year-old into the world’s most powerful voice on the climate crisis is revealed today by her mother.
Related: Malena Ernman: ‘Greta was the child, we were the emperor. And we were all naked’
Continue reading...‘There’s always some standard of beauty that you’re not meeting,’ she tells Miss Americana director Lana Wilson
Taylor Swift has disclosed her experiences with an eating disorder in a new documentary. In Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, which received its premiere at the Sundance film festival last night, Swift says that she would starve herself to the extent that she felt as if she might pass out during live performances.
The 30-year-old star said she would make a list of everything she ate, exercised constantly and shrank to a UK size two; she is now a size 10. “I would have defended it to anybody who said ‘I’m concerned about you,’” she tells the film’s director, Lana Wilson.
Continue reading...For years I binged on diet books: paleo, keto, vegan, the 16:8. But can you have too much of a good thing?
It started during the 1999 eclipse. The year before, I had run away to Devon. Lots of bad things had happened there, but the main one was that I’d got fat. On my 27th birthday, I was 5ft 6in and weighed a hefty (as I bizarrely thought then) 9st 2lb. Worse: according to every news story I read, I was going to get an incurable disease and die. The most likely cause would be food; mad cow disease hadn’t gone away, and then there were pesticides and insecticides and growth hormones. When a friend told me he’d heard organic diets were cancer-preventing, I was in. As the skies darkened on 11 August, and birds began their evening song hours too early, I pledged that if I survived the solar eclipse, I would eat only organic food. I would stay healthy, and I would not die.
When organic food didn’t make my life perfect, I tried food combining (no protein with carbs). Then veganism. For 20 years now, I have cycled between diets and diet books, in search of the perfect hack for a good life: great health, better skin, the optimum weight and all, of course, with minimal impact on the environment. (Like so many women who dedicate their eating disorders to saving the planet, I need what I eat to be in some way an ethical choice.) I have been a vegetarian, a meat eater; I have gone paleo, keto, macrobiotic, pegan (look it up).
Continue reading...Discovery of metabolic causes opens door to new treatments for dangerous eating disorder
Scientists have found that the devastating eating disorder anorexia nervosa is not purely a psychiatric condition but is also driven by problems with metabolism.
The finding may help to explain doctors’ poor record in treating the illness and pave the way for radical new approaches to predict and treat those who are most at risk.
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