Diets are dead! RIP

Diets are dead, an Editor’s letter.

Recently it has come to light that Victoria Beckham has lived off steamed fish and vegetables for thirty years. Whether she is at a Michelin Star restaurant or if Gordon Ramsey is cooking, she only eats steamed fish and vegetables.

When I was a teenager in the 70’s and 80’s there was only one desirable body type and that was Farah Fawcett’s. Nothing else was considered worthy.  In the fifties, real Mad Men style, some men sat in a smoky boardroom with whiskies and decided that the diet industry is going to make them a whole lot of money.

It was an easy sell. Glamorous Hollywood stars would live off cigarettes and forever be the standard women had to measure themselves against.

In those years, pills were a big thing in the diet trade, and one pill which was a “fad” was actually tape worm, thought to ingest the food one ate instead of your own body. True story. I was shocked when I Googled it today, and there it was still : The Tapeworm Diet, pros and cons. So people are still at it!!

Yes, standards were set decades ago. There was a calculator developed that was happily used by Weight Watchers and Herbal Life and Slim Fast and every other company who knew that the big bucks were coming in. This calculator was devised as height + weight and it spew out a number.

My magic number was 54 kg.

Needless to say, I last weighed 54 kg was when I was 9. So at 10 years old I got on the diet mill with my mom, who thought she was very overweight. I look at pictures of her now, and she was actually really skinny. But that was what was thrown at women then. Numbers, products and men laughing to the banks, sipping their stirred Martinis on yachts.

I remember clearly taking my Tupperware to school which only had a serving of tinned grapefruit in it. At 10. I was miserable. And embarrased. Everyone was happily eating their sandwiches. Then, my mom took us off to a Doctor, and at age 12 I was given a diet, injections and what must have been amphetamines. I will never forget the first day of that diet, I called a friend and we spoke crap on the phone for five hours straight. The problem was I was in my mom’s open spaced office that afternoon and I could not understand why the adults were giving me crazy looks. It was an ad agency. Of course they knew what my mom and I did not. I was on speed! At 12!

Then of course, I married a man that loved skinny girls in Levi’s 501s and I lived off broccoli (apparently said man has confessed that the smell of broccoli still makes him nauseous) and I lived off shakes for weeks. I took Shape shakes three times day for nine weeks in a row. That and Tab. Only.

I got down to 58 kg. I ate something. Was back to 60 kg in a day.

I read diet  books by the thousands, Atkins, you name them I have tried it. I even read a Christian book on the biblical way of losing weight which was to fast as often as possible. Who would think that mantra would become the biggest diet fad of the 2020s. There a frumpy Christian lady in Mid America started a big movement. You can’t open Instagram without some fasting programming advertised on your feed.

Cue to Princess Dianna telling the world she stayed slim by vomiting. BuliMIA has my name in it, let us just call it for what it is.

And in the 80’s one would see these skeleton girls walking around shopping mall, dead eyes. Anorexia was a big problem.

I remember a huge debate going on that Isabella Rosselini was too fat to appear naked in Blue Velvet in the 80s. Google those pics now, and one gasps! Was this was fat then? And Marilyn Monroe was said to be VERY curvey, yet Kim K had to lose 10 kgs to fit into the famous dress.

Then a woman by the name of Susan Powter told us to not eat any fat. In 1993 she was worth more than $50 million. Eat sweets, but don’t eat butter. Every product was “fat free”, but we did not realise they were pumping chemicals and sugar into those products to make it edible.

Then all of a sudden we were told to put butter in our coffees in the mornings and eat only meat. That debate has been silenced by meat prices lately.

In between all of this we had to do step aerobics in Reebok shoes and buy treadmills and make sure we pay our Planet Fitness accounts.

By the time I was 40, I was running an hour on the treadmill 5 days a week plus doing weights three times a week, plus yoga videos and — being a single mom and running my own business.

It was nuts. Oh, eat nuts are they good, oh wait, nuts are full of fat don’t eat them, no man, nuts are protein only eat them. Now I look at nuts and don’t know what to think. Must I not eat fruit as it is sugar? Or only eat fruit?

Then one day my mom passed. And she was so thin towards the end, she had diabetes and lived for chocolates. She never drank, smoked briefly in the 60’s cos my dad thought it was sexy and gave up and lived a clean, “Barley Green in morning”, life. But she loved chocolates. Say Godiva and her eyes would light up. When starting to pack her things up after the funeral, I would find slabs of Lindt in funny places. And I literally just woke up and said, (excuse me but its true), fuck it!  I had a friend who looked better than any of the famous models I photographed in my career (and I shot them all)… heads would literally screw off their axis when she walked pass — and then one day she called me to say she had colon cancer, her suspicion was from too much Red Bull while working for a big firm that involved a lot of travel. Her last words were, Mia, eat the croissants and drink the Champagne. Enjoy life. She passed a few months before my mom. So fuck it.

It is said that the aesthetic industry was worth 9 billion dollars in 2021. In a time of Covid!

Now the greedy men are rubbing their greasy hands together covered in blood as they do butt implants, and plump up lips and lift eye brows… and we do not want to look like ourselves. Even Madonna does not want to look like Madonna. Once it was thought that she had the most incredible body in the world and yet she went and inserted butt plastic in her derrière, until it went septic and she could not walk. Images of her on Instagram in a bath of ice moaning of the pain she was in, had us all confused. And she is just getting more and more confusing by the day. Her agonizing trying to hold onto youth, both in surgery, boyfriends and Insta filters has us all cringing a little. Or a lot. My gay male friends think she is fab. But then, woe on the gay male, as they now have incredibly unrealistic images they must live up to now too!

The Kardashians took it so far that none of them look like the people they were ten years ago. Now, curvy in all the right places has taken over as another ideal only the rich can afford. As they say, you are not ugly, you are only poor.

I have travelled the world with my work, and have made it a little game to look at sizes of women. The thinnest was way up north in Mozambique, where women had to walk miles for water and till the ground for food. Not ideal circumstances. The fattest was where fast food is the cheapest and the people the poorest. Mid America and in my hood on the West Rand. The Japanese seemed to be the healthiest but they all were exactly the same size, it was fascinating. Genetics.

Middle eastern women had  nice little bellies under their burquas. Just like the belly dancers. The French women wear their hair in a mess, hardly any make up but it is super important to be thin there. It has always been a thing they looked down on…someone with extra weight. Must have been quite a conversation at the Haute Couture Houses when they realised that the average woman cannot fit into their clothes, and if they wanted to sell clothes, that they needed to make and show- Gasp!- on the runway, curvier models. Quelle horreur!

In 2002, I told a well know fashion stylist that Ashley Graham was going to make it big, pun intended. He said, never in this life time or next will “fat” models make it in the fashion world. Well,  she is now worth about 20 million Dollars and has 18,7 million Instagram followers. She has been on every cover from Vogue, Sportman’s Illustrated and Elle.

Precious Lee, similarly has been on Elle and Vogue covers. I think as much as inclusion is a prerequisite for fashion houses, I do think behind private doors it still irks them. I have noticed on my social media posts, especially when I posted the Precious Lee cover, that the old school fashion types had nothing nice to say. Unhealthy! Go on a diet! Ai, everyone has an opinion.

Here we are in 2022, and I believe diets are dead. Not just because our trust have been broken so many times, by so many lies. But there is a war in Ukraine. We are working three times as hard now for a third of the money we earned ten years ago. We basically live to work to pay for a roof and petrol. There is no more middle class. The rich will forever be on diets and go for surgeries so they can go play in Ibiza and wear Prada. The rest of us sit on our butt’s and work. Or we sit on our butt’s worrying about not getting work. Either way, you can clearly see if a woman has an Amex or not, by her dress size. Poor women, cheap food, no nutritional value in said food, leads to overeating, empty calories. Voila! The truth.

As I write this there are huge farming protests in the Netherlands as the government wants to shut down farms. People of TikTok will know that the farmers are fighting back, and the shelves are empty in shops as farmers are holding onto their livelyhoods. Papers have been leaked from UN “apparently” reads that a hungry population makes for better workers. There are conspiracy theories for days about a planned food shortage as Covid did not do enough damage. I find conspiracy theories fascinating, as I have been reading avidly since childhood. I remember once reading an article about the homes and holidays of the Madoff family in Vanity Fair. I remember thinking to myself that something just is not right. And then boom! Oh ok Vanity Fair, you promoted one of the biggest Ponzi schemes ever with your publicity. I saw it with stories slowly starting to bubble to the surface a decade ago about Epstein. I just waited and waited, I watched the videos of the Island and all the hidden symbolism, and then BOOM! He is dead, or is he? Or was he murdered? Just have enough time, watch and wait - everything comes to light eventually. Bad diets are revealed in time too.

It is interesting, but also frightning cos if “they”, the TikTok and YouTubers are right, we are in for a really rough time. But then I thought Covid was just a Chinese thing until my dad made the news, and I sat in hospital twice. Do I trust the world media, no, I have been sick many times with Bronchitis but this was not a normal virus. And yet, we are still not allowed the truth. Like who actually killed JFK. Still. Trust has been broken with the main stream media, with Doctors, Pharma, with anyone who comes up with any theory. It is each one for themselves now. No matter how you argue on social media, everyone makes up their own minds about everything now.

In a world where worrying and anxiety is so rife, I think the last thing anyone is needs is to worry about is what the scale says. We need to eat what we get. I just shake my head at people on social media who still try sell potions and diet plans — Man, are they out of touch with the ordinary woman on this planet. Even Jesus said, do not think about what is one your plate, just be grateful for it. And he said that 2022 years ago.

We need to keep our kids safe. Just that alone is a big task. We need to feed our kids… if my parents came back from heaven today and saw what food costs, they would faint. It is a tough life. We had so many lives lost the past two years. All of us lost someone, if not four, five, ten people. Suicide is on the rise. Teens are on anxiety pills.

No, the last thing we need right now is someone telling us what to eat. I know I will have to lose the lockdown weight eventually, and I will do it with a very simple method of restricting calories, wow … who knew it was that easy. Follow these two guys on TikTok @evidencebased_training (Adam Sullivan) , and @jamessmithpt  (James Smith) They are the only two on social media telling the truth… Adam even has a nice name for the idiots with obscure diet rules, but watch it yourself. And it is entertaining.

As James Smith says, swimmers don't look like swimmers cos they hit the pool, swimmers look like swimmers cos they were born that way and was genetically built to swim. He just throws in a few cuss words in between as exclamation marks, but that is basically it. You cannot fight your genetic make up. Gisele was born looking like Gisele, so we really cannot look at her lifestyle as an example to live by.  As much as I tried to please my first husband by being a Levis straight leg 501 cut girl with small boobs,( apparently more than a hand full of boob is too much I was told) I was not that person. Fast forward thirty years, he has a tall leggy blonde with no boobs and I have a man that loves my curves. Which is my last point, I never realised how many men loved a bit extra. It is a thing, and I was only told this a short while ago, I never imagined as a young woman that curves would one day be accepted. Which just goes to show, a confident happy woman is an attractive one. Unfortunately, if a man is into a certain look, he will trade in the older model. Then why suffer all those years with a miserable life, if what you were miserable for, just dumps you anyway. Happens all the time.

I know that Victoria Beckham gets a trade off that is well worth it (said in an Ali G accent) She is making a great living ( read $$$$) that is worth the trade off by not eating. I think honestly, if any woman was going to make millions, she would live off blanched vegetables. But we don’t. So we don’t have to.

Like my friend said, life is short, eat the croissants.

RIP Diets, and don’t come back. We have seen through you and your lies! Viva!

PS. And I hope and pray that my gay male friends will stop with this Abs worship nonsense, I know it is highly desireable, but we have seen so many gay male suicides lately, can we shift the conversation to mental health rather? I am afraid that gay males, are going to have to walk the same road that us women had to all these decades with unrealistic demands made that can only be attained through surgery, steroids, coke and no joy. Alas, it is a conversation the gay community must start. I think I have said enough!