I'll eat you, Kate Moss.

Kate Moss recently shared with the world one of her "mottos": "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."

This is a contentious statement. It promotes unhealthy body image in a Western society that is already rife with women who obsess over their dress size or the circumference of their thighs. It is a damaging message to send to young girls, and one that you can find plastered all over the sad forums in pro-anorexia sites (yes, they exist).

I don't understand why the utterance of this "motto,"this thinspiration, is so shocking, though. Take one quick look at the supermodel and it's obvious that eating isn't one of her regular indulgences. Her 2005 cocaine scandal would lead us to believe that she prefers snorting her energy instead of chewing it. So why are the words ("I don't eat") worse than the image of a woman who clearly eats very little? Her teeny-tiny frame has become normalized (sad, yet true) through repetition in the millions of photos of her (and others like her; she's by no means the only one) in which we see this almost child-like body glamourized and adored. But we throw our arms up in outrage when the bony woman explains how she maintains such perfect emaciation. What's with that?

I also think we squirm at celeb admissions like these because there's some part of our female psyche that wants to believe that she's "naturally" thin. Amazing genes! A metabolism that's faster than Usain Bolt! Believing in such things allows unknown, non-stick-thin women to uphold the fantasy that models and actresses possess superior DNA than the rest of us (and maybe some can thank Mom and Dad for their natural thinness) and that's why they're so darn skinny. But when someone admits that they're thin because they don't eat, it shatters the illusion that those famous bodies are predisposed to thinness through some evolutionary "advantage." No one said the truth was an easy pill to swallow.

Being healthy feels better than being overweight or obese. That argument I buy. I have qualms, though, with the notion that being uber-tiny feels inherently better than being healthy. I mean physically speaking. I think that what might feel good about being extremely, celebrity-like skinny to some people is that they've achieved an ideal - not my ideal, but society's "thin ideal" - and this elevates them somehow, it sets them apart from the rest of us who are thin (but not shockingly so), or healthy, or chubby, or fifty pounds overweight. Our society praises people who have achieved this insane ideal. We see that message reinforced in every single piece of media that we consume. In Kate Moss's case, her skinniness is rewarded with mutli-million dollar modeling contracts and superstardom. So it's easy to see how, for Kate Moss anyway, being skinny feels pretty damn awesome.

Maybe things are changing, with celebs like Beth Ditto, America Ferrera, and Jennifer Hudson, among others, offering fresh representations of the female body in the media. There's also curvier model Crystal Renn who wrote Hungry about how, by gaining weight, she gained confidence and landed more gigs that she ever had as a twig with disordered eating. I haven't read that yet, but it's on my to do list.

I don't know. This is a complex issue - it's heavy, too heavy - and one that I've personally invested too much time, energy, and anguish into. I know I won't solve anything in a blog post, but it's good to talk things out. I could literally go on and on and on about this forever and still have more to add to the Appendixes. I studied a lot of fat/thin related literature while working on my mother-of-a-paper for my grad program. So, as a pupil, I've studied about the pressures and effects of the disappearing female body in contemporary media and, as a woman of that society, I've lived it.

In closing, I should also mention that there's another part to Kate's motto. Here it is in full: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. You try and remember it, but it never works." Huh. Weird. It sure looks like it works to me.

All of thinking has tuckered me out. Now I'm gonna go stuff my face with cheesecake and watch Oprah.