Kelly Osbourne, a one-time champion for curves, is also proud of her recent weight-loss of seven kilograms. This was achieved by a revolutionary diet where Osbourne swapped her usual fare of chips and soft drink for ”fresh foods’.

See, it’s just that easy! Thank you, The Media. Anyway, she’s done an interview with the UK Mirror where she talks about how being called fat drove her to drugs and drink–but she still doesn’t like herself.

Do you ever wish you weren’t famous?
KO: [W]hen I was 15 I had people writing about how fat and ugly they thought I was. They still do it now and it still hurts, but not as much as it did back then… I gained a bunch of weight because mum had been diagnosed with cancer and I had been miserable, and he had an airbrushed picture of me on TV and said, ‘That’s not you, you’re fat.’ I remember feeling like I just wanted to crawl into a hole, and when I got home I cried for about two weeks. Comments like that led me to drugs and alcohol. When you’re 15 and you’re suddenly faced with, ‘you’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re just a celebrity’s daughter’, you’re like, ‘I never wanted to be famous’.

Are you happy with yourself now?
KO: I think I’m OK. I wouldn’t say I’m happy with myself. I would love to be a bit skinnier, every girl would.

Oh, honey. Put the blame on the media, not on yourself! (And please don’t throw out that stereotype of “every girl,” either, while you’re at it.)

By the way, in other celebrity news, the National Enquirer has Star Jones on the cover with the headline “Star Jones Packs on 45 Pounds!” I flipped through it at the supermarket (when I was loading up my cart with “chips and soft drink,” of course) and it was all “She looked so great after she had WLS! When she was thin! But now she’s ‘ballooning’! OMG!” So we have more of those stories to look forward to, I guess, if it’s true…!

In the clip I saw on Jezebel, Star apologizes to her colleagues for “placing a burden” on them and says she never asked them to lie, and that “Pilates and portion control” was invented by the tabloids. Oprah said “I’d heard Pilates too… I was doing Pilates and I went, well damn… what kind of Pilates is she doing?” Oprah goes on to say:

What I thought, as a viewer, is that you were… ashamed. And I wasn’t thinking ashamed of the weight because I really believed you, along with so many other people, when you were saying that you were fine being overweight. I thought you were ashamed of gastric bypass. I thought you were ashamed to say “I did it this way” and I didn’t, you know, work out every day and do the diet thing.

Star’s response is that it would have been “the easiest thing in the world to say gastric bypass” but harder to admit she had been “selling a bill of goods” for the last few years, and she didn’t want to talk about it at all. Then the clip ends.

I guess I would interpret “selling a bill of goods” that her whole “I’m fine being fat” was a lie, and that she didn’t want to admit it was a lie. But tell me if you disagree with my interpretation. I don’t feel like Star Jones is straightforward enough here for me to understand her, although I do understand simply wanting to keep it private. The Oprah blog reports on another part of the interview:

Jones admitted she was scared to disappoint people and ashamed that she wasn’t able to control her weight. “… I was an addict for all practical purposes, that I had never stuck to a real diet, that I’d never stuck to a real exercise program, and that when confronted by my doctor and the doctor said if you don’t make changes, you will die. I had no choice.” Jones said. “When you hear people say, oh, you took the easy way out, I would have longed for an easy way. It was not an easy way. It was this — the hardest struggle of my whole entire life and I still struggle.”

The ladies on The View then respond to Star’s appearance on Oprah’s show. They say things like “she looks great” and “she seems healthy and happy” and “we really do wish her well.” Then Joy Behar says:

We had to cover for her. I don’t know if you call that [a] “lie,” I wouldn’t call it a lie. But she did have her bypass, and we had to say it was with dieting and exercise, which it wasn’t. So now we all know the truth. So good. Let her go and have a happy life.

It’s interesting that she says “I wouldn’t call it a lie.” What else would you call it?

The View clip:

It’s a tough situation. Because does Star Jones have an obligation to set the record straight about “Pilates and portion control,” or does she have the right to keep her weight loss surgery private? People (even Oprah Winfrey) were misled into thinking they could lose drastic amounts of weight with “Pilates and portion control,” but was that Star’s fault? How about the average person who gets WLS… is it okay to pretend it was “exercise and diet” when it wasn’t? Why?

Part of the reason is that some obese people “settle.” They may marry someone less for love / passion and more because they don’t want to be alone. They put up with emotional and / or physical abuse, financial irresponsibility, infidelity and the like because they don’t think they deserve / can find anything better. Then they lose weight and suddenly realize they can. The irony is they probably always could have.

She also cites jealousy, codependence, and sexual experimentation as possible reasons. (Of course in Star’s case, rumor has it that she’s not the one experimenting, if you know what I’m saying. Although she is allegedly dating Miami Heat player Dwayne Wade.)

I’m glad that the quote above touches on the idea of low self-esteem—of course, WLS is not the only or even the best solution to this problem—and that just because someone is obese, they should never feel like they have to “settle.” I also know people who have had WLS or who have gained or lost a lot of weight and whose partners stick by them. I don’t know that I have any answers, but I do find the whole phenomenon—and Espy’s list—interesting.

[w]hile I’m on the subject of Queen Latifah and losing weight: do any of you think some people just look better when they’re heavier? I hardly recognized Star Jones after her bariatric surgery. She was beautiful as a larger woman, but now I don’t think so.

Or am I just prejudiced against fat people who lose weight?

Some responses:

i_geek:

I agree with you. I think it has to do with each person’s weight setpoint. I look at the face. If it looks healthy, then I tend to assume that the person it’s on is also healthy, regardless of weight. Look at the Shapelings in Kate’s BMI project. Their faces glow with health and radiate beauty, whether they’re “underweight” or “morbidly obese”.

Bree:

I also believe some women look better heavier, and Star Jones is one of them. After she had her WLS, her face got so gaunt. She didn’t look healthy. Carnie Wilson looked great when she was big too. Renee Zellwegger is another that looks a lot pretter with meat on her bones. She just doesn’t have the facial structure and features to pull off extremely thin. I don’t know if she uses Botox (I suspect it), but when she drops weight for roles, her face looks so unnatural. Not everyone is supposed to be a walking skeleton.

SRGal:

I don’t see anything wrong with Queen Latifah wanting to lose weight. It’s her decision. Maybe she feels that she’ll be more comfortable if she loses a few pounds.

If she’s beautiful as a larger women, she’ll still be beautiful as a smaller person. I mean, beauty comes from the inside, right?

It’s a slippery slope; can we judge people for being “too skinny” and then complain when people judge us for being “too fat”? And yet I still share some of these opinions. I think Renee Zelwegger does look better when she’s not at her thinnest. I think Star Jones did look weird when she lost all that weight. Can we have different rules for celebrities who are straining to fit the Hollywood ideal? Probably not.

And then there’s a model named Geo Burke. She used to be a size 18 (“hard to believe”!) and now she’s a size 14 (a “positive role model”!) At her current size, her agent is happy to represent her as a plus-size model, and she says: “Hopefully I can show people that you don’t have to be skinny to be beautiful.”

What would happen if she were a size 16? Or a size 20? Or a size 12? (Remember that Sarah the “plus size model” got kicked off of America’s Next Top Model for losing weight, and therefore being in between “normal” and “plus size.”)

It seems like in the case of Geo Banks, or Star Jones, or possibly even people we know, we quietly decide there’s a perfect weight just for them—not too fat, not too skinny, but just right. Is this connected to health? To aspiration? To how attractive they are to us? To how hot or cold the porridge is? Is anyone entitled to determine what the “just right” point is for someone else? Is Star Jones entitled to look like a llama if she wants to, and are we obligated to keep our mouths shut about it? Personally, I’m confused, and I want to know. What do you think?

Full & Fabulous, a non-profit organization that helps plus-size women and girls cope with peer pressures, is upset at Star Jones after they invited Star to speak at their “Health, Beauty and Self-Esteem Expo” during the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit. Jones reportedly didn’t show up to the gig – - which normally wouldn’t be newsworthy. However, according to TMZ.com, Jones demanded first class airfare, a suite at a five-star hotel and $30,000 to show up… As a former full girl, you would think she wouldn’t treat her thick sistas like that.

This raises two questions right off the bat: if this happened in 2006, why is this coming out now? And why would a group named Full & Fabulous want Star Jones to speak to them in the first place, when she isn’t fat, had surgery and pretended it was “Pilates” that caused her to lose weight, and hasn’t been particularly fat positive? (Wait, was she still fat in 2006? We need a Star Jones timeline.) At any rate, it gets better: TMZ has a video of Star Jones storming out on a reporter asking her about the controversy.

Oh, Star Jones. Welcome back.

On the one side are the people who truly believe with every bit of their being that WLS is bad and evil and unnecessary…They will call WLS mutilation and amputation and deformation, because it is the worst thing they can imagine anyone doing to themselves.

On the other side are the people who think that WLS is nothing short of a miracle, the answer to every medical problem ever associated with being obese.

She puts herself somewhere between these two camps, in the “green zone.” And Anne, in the wake of the Star Jones revelation, is dealing with conflicting feelings herself:

People, I understand why Star Jones didn’t want to talk about it. Because it feels like an admission of failure. It feels likes saying you know what? This diet thing isn’t working, and I cannot do this any more. I can imagine that it might have felt like publicly calling yourself too fat, and too stupid to lose weight.

Kate Harding has also written about this issue recently:

Weight loss surgery doesn’t just make you thin; it makes you physically unable to eat large quantities of food and in most cases, much less able to digest fatty or sugary foods. So basically, it forces you onto exactly the kind of diet already recommended to control diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol — the kind of diet that, absent WLS, might not make you much thinner, even if it makes you much healthier.

And of course, there’s plenty more pro and con WLS blog entries out there (most of them firmly in one of Melinda’s zones). So what do you think? Is WLS miraculous, evil, or somewhere in the middle? Are fat acceptance and weight-loss surgery mutually exclusive? And if not, how do you reconcile the two?

(Thanks to Melinda and Anne for writing about their WLS experiences with such honesty.)

“[T]he complete truth is, I was scared of what people might think of me,” she continues. “I was afraid to be vulnerable, and ashamed at not being able to get myself under control without this procedure.”

“I used to look in the mirror and take pride in my figure, but that was when I was legitimately a full-figured woman,” she says. “I’d gradually gone from full-figured to morbidly obese.”

The issue of Glamour in which she talks about the surgery hits newsstands August 7th. So, what do you think?

“I know that people are curious,” Jones admitted. “I’ve changed completely from the way I looked when I first started in television and the way I look now. I think it does a service to the audience to [not] really explain. I think in the coming months, I will have explained (the change). By the time the show goes on the air, no one will have to ask those questions again.”

After more questioning, she ultimately admitted that she wrote an article for Glamour. My money is firmly in the square of weight-loss surgery, and I’m glad she’s finally spilling, because this cone of silence is ridiculous. Let’s keep our eyes peeled on upcoming issues of Glamour, shall we? Oh, I can’t wait!

Via my new favorite television blog, What’s Alan Watching?

Poor Kirstie Alley is facing yet another weight loss scandal. This time, her reported 74-pound weight loss on the Jenny Craig program has left her with sagging skin on her stomach. She’d like to get it removed with surgery, but unfortunately can’t – it would break her contract with Jenny Craig. Her contract with them clearly forbids “any surgery of any kind”.

Except, now I see that the Skinny Website is really all about being Skinny. They posted an adorable picture of Kelly Clarkson with the comment that she has “totally let herself go.” Gross. Nevermind.

Oh, and per IMDB, Courtney Love is talking about her weight loss in more detail:

[S]he achieved her new look thanks to 1,200-calorie Isopure shakes and fish and vegetables. And her willpower was helped by her determination to squeeze into a pair of Todd Lynn trousers, which she wore to a Beverly Hills party on Monday night. She told People magazine, “They’re Todd Lynn, they’re sample size, they’re from the runway.” Love also explained why gastric surgery wasn’t an option for her: “I’m not eligible for that. It’s illegal for me to get that. You have to be 100 pounds overweight, you have to be grossly obese.”

It is hard to keep up with all this celebrity gossip! Phew! Fortunately, the tabloids only care about women gaining and losing weight, otherwise it would be twice as hard. Oh, I’m sorry, was that sarcasm that slipped out right there?