SO, you may or may not know that for a while I was the very public face of Jenny Craig weight loss. I lost a lot of weight, which was great. But then I started to put the weight back on, which wasn’t so great.
And I got a call from the publicist, and she said, “Darling, I’ve just had a phone call, and the paparazzi have got some shots of you on Bondi Beach in your bathers.”
Now, I’m not an especially vain woman, but there aren’t too many women I know who would feel completely comfortable with having candid, unflattering pictures of themselves in their wet, clinging bathers splashed across every newsstand in the country. And for just a moment, I felt so vulnerable that I wanted to cry.
Because I knew what was in store. I was about to be “Kirstie Alley’d”. I was going to be publicly shamed for my failure to keep the weight off. And that was not a prospect that I relished.
But there was a deeper and far more disturbing fear. I felt as though a cold hand had reached deep into the depths of my soul, and was rattling the cage of a long-buried fear that I’d completely forgotten I had. That fear was a fear of the mob — that somehow I would do something unwittingly, and that people would turn into an unreasoning, nasty, irrational mob that would attack me.
Read the full article by Magda Szubanski in the Stellar Magazine at The Daily Telegraph.