Just as the pitiless bombardment of New Year good-habit advice might be starting to abate, another couple of trends have landed that will curdle the gut biota of all those smug Dry Veganuary practitioners: dirty wellness and anti-influencers.
The former, coined by – who else? – a nutritionist to the British royal family, is a new take on the old 80-20 rule. Do most things right, but be naughty some of the time, says Gabriela Peacock. Years of the “clean eating” craze and fixating on “wellness” have paradoxically left more than 60% of Britons overweight or obese. Peacock reckons striving for purity has been counterproductive, when just getting our diets about right most of the time is good enough.
Most winningly, she cites a recent American study by the Institute for the Psychology of Eating showing guilt can slow people’s metabolism. That factoid alone suggests a new bestseller: The No F---*-Given Diet: Incinerate Those Calories by Practising Unrepentance. Eat up and Gloat Your Way to Thin!
Disappointingly, Peacock’s book is entitled a hackneyed 2 Weeks to a Younger You.
Still, a worthy companion trend for dirty wellness is the new wave of internet stars ruthlessly unfiltering the gloaty fit-fluencer crowd. Epitomised by a strappingly photogenic former magazine editor, Danae Mercer, this movement exposes social media stars’ deceptions – rather as rogue magicians blab about how the lady-sawn-in-half trick is really done.
Mercer posts her “me looking sublime in a bikini” shots and her “what it looks like when I allow myself to breathe out” shots. There are also pics of her in normal adult human posture – ie, not arching her back like a demented shelf-stacker to elongate her torso, or doing that shag-on-a-rock head-hoisting thing to give herself a more “snatched” jawline.
She also snitches on cunning filters that shrink noses and chisel cheekbones.
She still looks annoyingly spectacular letting her ever-so-slightly rounded midsection hang out and scrunching her crêpey bits. But her mission is admirable. After years following the modern norm of gloating up large on Instagram and the like, she developed misgivings. How might she one day explain to her infant daughter what she was doing?
Upon reflection, conning people, including the young and impressionable and the ageing and insecure, into thinking Barbie perfection was breezily achievable didn’t seem like a mother’s optimal teachable example. For fun, she started breaking the magic circle’s rules, exposing how most internet darlings cheat their “look”.
Critics cavil that she is still showing off her fabulousness, just recruiting a new kind of follower.
She is hardly in the same brave category as the clever Australian lampooner Celeste Barber, who mercilessly imitates the internet’s sultriest viral images in daggy “Mrs Average” homespun style.
But it can’t hurt to be reminded, via Mercer’s subversion of her own aspirational visuals, that even the bikini-bossing likes of Liz Hurley get, shall we say, a smidge of convexity about the puku when they eat or (oh, the lack of discipline!) exhale, and that this is not when they snap their power poses.
Coincidentally, into this fray has leapt a further confounding competitor: a Cornell University philosophy professor who says there’s no proven health risk in obesity and we should simply widen our seats, aisles and britches so the overweight can expand unashamed into their comfort zone.
Kate Manne’s book, Unshrinking, has scandalised health professionals by positing that the causal link between obesity and illnesses such as diabetes is not provable. She goes a step beyond body positivity, calling for the normalisation of obesity.
Heaven knows what “healthy” body imperatives will trend next, but let’s brace for: “dirty obesity”, an apologia for those lacking the commitment to get more than a bit pudgy.
