The Denim Bar at the Fred Segal boutique on Melrose is where hot Hollywood
goes to fit tiny bottoms into $300 jeans. On a Saturday afternoon, a blonde
baby- woman is having a tough time coming to terms with the fact that “fat”
is bulging over the tiny, 25in waistband of her skinny jeans. Pivoting this
way and that in front of the mirror, she grabs at her “fat” in heart-racing,
face-crumpling desperation. She has the barest covering of life-giving,
nourishing, desirable fat; a tiny amount that just comes between her and the
ribcage horrors of anorexia.
Her friend tells her she isn’t fat; I am so astonished that this whisper of a
thing thinks she looks fat that I also tell her she isn’t; then the male
assistant assures her she looks great. But she is inconsolable. In her mind,
she is fat.
What passes for fat in LA now is little more than skin and bone. At stores
such as Kitson, on Robertson Boulevard, a size above 6 (UK size 10) is a
rare find. LA stylists point the finger at the media for constantly
publicising weight gain and loss, so that it is now a cultural obsession.
Whoever is to blame, the upshot is that, as one stylist puts it, “It’s now
kinda hip to be incredibly thin.”
LA has long held the reputation of being the health-and-fitness capital of the
world. What starts here inevitably ends up in the UK. There was a time not
long ago when Bikram yoga, carb-free diets, fasting, weekly colonics and
personal trainers were all laughable LA fads. Now, they are entrenched in
the British health-and-fitness culture. Skinny is fast becoming a
fascination in the UK — we already have our own skinny icon in the shape of
Victoria Beckham, who joins Nicole Richie and her LA skeleton sisters on the
internet’s pro-ana (pro-anorexia) and pro-mia (pro-bulimia) websites. These
disturbing sites, also called thinspiration galleries, are full of messages
from girls lauding Beckham and her ilk for their “beautiful, inspirational”
body sizes.
Off the internet and on the LA streets, pencil-like slenderness, natural or
otherwise, is the prevailing aesthetic among the late- teens to
mid-twentysomethings in particular, but most women of a certain social or
professional aspiration want or, more pointedly, are expected to be rail
thin — ideally, the mythical size zero. The boobs- and-bum sexuality that
once defined the LA aesthetic is over. When someone now asks, “Who did your
breasts?”, it is as likely to be about a reduction as an enlargement.
Even New Yorkers are shocked. In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the
actress Debra Messing said: “In New York, I’m a hottie. In LA, because I’m
no longer a size zero, I’ve fallen out of favour.” Gwen Stefani, Lara Flynn
Boyle, Sharon Stone, Juliana Margulies and Heidi Klum have all made similar
comments.
The designer Michael Kors has said that New York women are “proud of starving
down to a size 4 (UK size 8). In Hollywood, nobody breathes what size they
are unless it’s a 2 (UK 6).” But a 2 is not good enough; Kors says he is
sending more and more zeros to LA. There are sizes smaller than zero: double
zero (the reported size of the Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria),
negative zero, XXS, even negative 2. It is difficult to give British
versions of these sizes — they are almost unthinkable. As the actress
Jennifer Love Hewitt said on television recently: “When you are a size 2 and
you are the fattest person in the room, that’s weird.”
This isn’t just dieting; this is more akin to a mass cultural eating disorder.
Brooke Hailey, of LA’s New Directions Eating Disorders Center, says: “I have
several personal trainers among my clients who are anorexic. More and more,
I am seeing patients with bundles of disordered behaviours: over-exercising,
overzealous exclusion of certain foods, the use of anti-anxiety medicines
that also curb the appetite. Everyone wants to look like the LA girl — it’s
the culture, and it’s very, very accepted.”
There is a vast industry of thin here in this city. Personal trainers who
prescribe crazy regimes and cranky diets are treated like gods if they get
the results people want. Cosmetic surgeons will perform liposuction as
regularly as Botox — an insane proposition, given the eventual scarring, but
it works, for now. As one woman explained: “You can get lipo on any part of
the body now. It’s one fast way to go from slim to very slim.” Breasts are
tricky. The fashion-conscious LA female with big fake ones is now downsizing
to fit more sleekly into fashion.
The starting point seems to be the recent relationship between the Hollywood
red carpet and the fashion world. Fashion requires the clothes-hanger model
body to show off its clothes to best effect, so actresses without the freak
racehorse physiques of the catwalk model have had to slim down.
Stylists have their part to play in this. Negar Ali, who has worked with
Beyoncé and Naomi Watts, admits: “I have been guilty of getting frustrated
with clients who are not a sample size.” Another — anonymous — stylist says:
“If I get 20 samples, and 15 are too small for the client, she needs a very
strong sense of self not to get caught up in it. Everywhere you look, there
is someone slimmer, tanner, blonder. I know for a fact that it is nauseating
being on the red carpet, gawked at by the world. It breeds deep
self-scrutiny.”
Queen of the stylists is Rachel Zoe, who is responsible for turning Lindsay
Lohan, Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton and others into global fashion icons.
One gossip-rag journalist has said: “That girl Rachel Zoe definitely has
something to do with [this trend]. I’ve seen her eat — and she doesn’t. It’s
the classic ‘living for clothes, dying for fashion’.”
Zoe sports the same LA look — bone-thin glamour — as her clients. She has
publicly denied playing any part in glamorising eating disorders (Lohan
apparently confessed to having an eating disorder in Vanity Fair, but
subsequently claimed the magazine had taken her words out of context. In the
same magazine, Richie admitted that she was scared by her own drastic weight
loss). The anonymous stylist says: “I’ve worked with Rachel all day on a
shoot, and basically, she drank a giant latte and smoked a bunch of
cigarettes.” Then she adds, respectfully: “She is a great stylist, though.”
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medication such as Adderall can cause
weight loss because of its rapid side effects. The telephone numbers of
hooky doctors prepared to prescribe strange cocktails of drugs get passed
around among friends. In a changing room at a gym, I heard the following
story: “Last year, someone gave my cousin this doctor’s number, for weight
loss. She went to him and he gave her loads of pills: a mixture of
prescription and supplements. My brother had a party, we’re drinking, and
you would not believe the state she got in — she shat herself, wet herself,
she was puking. Because of all those pills. He never told her not to drink.”
Someone else in that changing room then said: “Have you got his number?”
It goes without saying that eating bread or pasta in LA is a social no-no.
Italian food has had to be redefined: it now means steamed fish, lemon and
salads. Even sushi has been modified — Jason Harley, the healthy chef of
Hollywood, recently opened a restaurant on Sunset, where he works with “no
oil, butter or cream; instead, herbs, broths, reductions and water. Our
sushi comes three ways: normal; low carb, with a paper thin layer of skinny
rice; and no carb, wrapped in lettuce”.
Harley says that celebrities “don’t really eat; they’re very picky”, but
compared with “all those skinny LA girls”, the average celebrity appetite is
hearty. “We have a joke that when we hand them the amuse-gueule, we say,
‘Your dinner’s here.’ Except it isn’t that much of a joke.”
()
Reaching size-zero “perfection”, or getting as damn close as possible,
involves some degree of privation and extremely hard work. It is not enough
to starve yourself; the LA look dictates that you look toned as well. Even
though you are hungry, you need to go to the gym. Even Richie goes to the
gym four times a week.
At Barry’s Boot Camp, in West Hollywood, the car park is full of giant black
SUVs by 5.15am: that’s when the LA girls start arriving for the morning’s
first class. By 5.25am, 40 of them will be running on treadmills and pumping
iron in a dark, airless room, all focused on the relentless 45-minute
workout led by Barry himself. “The town knows me as a hard taskmaster. I’m
the hard-core drill instructor,” he says.
The phrase “sweating buckets” is no hyperbole here. The first three classes of
the morning are all Academy classes. Academy clients sign up for a one-month
programme, on which you are expected to show up five days a week. In truth,
many of Barry’s clients are permanently on the Academy. “They come here to
take off weight, get disciplined and push themselves into a great shape.
Why? They get addicted to the stress relief, and I can give people the look
they want: toned, strong, with no body fat.”
“Toned, strong, with no body fat” is the mission statement of countless
service providers: personal trainers, gyms, detox and weight-loss centres,
spas, cosmetic surgeons and doctors all chasing the dollars that women will
spend to reach their clothing grail.
The trainers in LA all come with their own trademark nutritional advice. There
was a slight atmosphere when talking to Barry and the co-owner of Barry’s
Boot Camp, Rachel Mumford, about the evils of complex carbohydrates. Mumford
is in her late thirties, with three kids and the body of a slender
20-year-old. She works out a minimum of five times a week. If you are
exercising twice a day, as plenty of LA women do, surely you need the
sustained energy-release of starchy carbs?
Mumford: “You can get everything you need from fruit and vegetables, if you
need to keep your weight down. Every trainer says no to complex carbs.”
Barry: “You should have a gram of carbs per pound of body weight, and they
should come from fruit and vegetables.”
What about brown rice? “Only before 11am,” Barry says.
For dinner, Mumford has “chicken, fish or egg whites with broccoli and
tomato”. I’m really struggling to countenance a diet such as this. Barry
says: “If you are happy being a size 4 (UK size 8) then that’s okay. But
it’s also okay if you want to be skinny, as long as you are eating right.
Thin can be in shape, because you’re carrying less body weight. A true
Barry’s girl is a shining example of healthy LA women on the go.”
Mumford says: “This is extreme fitness for people who want to get as fit as
possible. It’s for A-type personalities. Perfectionists.”
I mention that I have seen two of their morning clients at other gym classes
in the evening. “Coming twice a day, it’s not a bad thing; it’s a healthy
addiction to have,” Mumford says. Those same two girls I mentioned had
laughed, “Hey! Are you an LA girl now?” when they saw me at my second class
of the day.
Just down the road is Train, a private gym where a hundred personal trainers
hone their furiously goal-oriented clients. At reception, I say I want a
trainer who can help me get thin. I say I really like the way Nicole Richie
looks. “It’s a little bony for me,” he says, “but I know what you mean.
Visible clavicles and hip bones, that sort of a look?” He writes down a list
of trainers who deal in that sort of body.
The boot-camp approach is popular. It can have great results, according to
Mimi Golnaraghi, who lost 21lb in three months and wound up, at 5ft, just
over six stone. “I wasn’t as skinny as Nicole Richie, probably more the size
of Hilary Duff. I had to get a boob job because I could no longer fit into
the smallest bra size.”
But Golnaraghi’s experience also left her with no periods, a thyroid problem
and IBS. “I went to my trainer two hours a day, five days a week for a year.
I paid $550 a month. His schtick is, ‘I take your body, strip it of fat and
then add muscle.’ His diet plan takes you into a state of ketosis [the state
in which the body burns fat as fuel in the absence of carbohydrates]. My
daily diet was, breakfast: egg whites and rocket; lunch: chicken breast and
vegetables; dinner: egg white and rocket.
“Every day, he checks your pee for glucose levels, to make sure you are in
ketosis. If you aren’t, he calls you a fat-ass. You don’t show up if you’ve
eaten bread.
I once drank a can of full-sugar soda, thinking it was diet. When I realised,
I started crying hysterically and rang him. He told me to calm down and
immediately get on the treadmill for an hour.”
But perhaps more surprising than all the trainers, surgeons, diet centres,
juice-fasting gurus, colon-cleansers, cranky nutritionists, yoga centres and
fat- and carb-free dining is that the most basic weight-loss tools known to
woman are back in town. You know there has been a critical shift in the
culture when people start smoking and drinking coffee again. Caffeine and
nicotine, in California? As the anonymous stylist says: “Skinny isn’t just a
trend; it’s the culture now.”
HOW DO I TELL MY BEST FRIEND SHE'S TOO THIN?
You don’t. Unless somebody has body dysmorphia — a distorted, highly critical
body image — they know when they’re too thin. Just like they know when
they’re too fat. Telling them is not going to help, it’s just going to hurt.
If they ask you if they’re too thin, then fine, agree with them. Just do it
gently. Don’t say they look terrible, but don’t say they look great, either,
in an attempt to reassure them, or because they’re trying to get you on
side. Do ask them if they’re okay and get them to talk about why they’ve
lost so much weight.
Nobody really believes that women as thin as Nicole Richie are happy, or think
they look great. There may be some underlying emotional difficulty, whether
it’s an issue with self-worth or problems with intimate relationships. There
are usually reasons for excessive weight loss, nearly all of them emotional.
It may be the excitement of new love, or a relationship that’s badly wrong. It
may be a shock to the system, such as having a baby, a move to a new job, or
even a promotion at work. It may be stress-related, or attached to grief
over the death of somebody close. It might even, in some cases, be a symptom
of a psychiatric condition, such as severe depression, or an anxiety or
eating disorder. There may be a physical problem, too, for which they need
help and support.
If a friend offers no information, don’t press them, but do keep a gentle eye
on them. Be kind, but above all, be patient. Usually, extreme weight loss
will resolve itself in a few months. It may be longer if somebody is
wrestling with an emotional problem, but the worst thing you can do is shut
them up or put them on the defensive by judging them (and “You’re too thin”
almost always sounds like a judgment). They may be trapped in a place that
they can’t escape from.
The best thing that any of us can do for our friends is to make them feel
accepted and unconditionally loved. Once they feel safe enough to tell us
how they really feel and ask for help, they almost always will.
Sally Brampton
