Lily Allen and Body Image
English Singer Bites Back After Cheryl Tweedy Comment
She says she won't lose weight and does not diet
Lily Allen has been put through the ringer lately. The English singer, who has released one album, has already been in the spotlight for things unrelated to her music, namely, over size.
Lily is a size 8, British size 12. Not a big deal, unless you’re a rising star. Size 8 doesn’t bode well for sales, head honchos think, for whatever reason they’ve come up with. The idea that all women must be a size 2 is beyond logical- what difference does it make to them?
The size incident began when Lily launched her new clothing line, Lily Loves, at the same time as Kate Moss was publicizing her new line. The media compared the two women and took pictures of them side by side.
Comments were made by Cheryl Tweedy that made Lily feel terrible about her size and who she was. She wrote in her MySpace blog about how bad she felt about herself and that she was considering bypass surgery and liposuction in order to feel better.
After the storm of almost 3,000 comments on her blog giving her support for being beautiful just the way she was, she posted another blog the next day titled, “I’m sorry.” She apologized for spewing out about the comments and reassured her fans that she was feeling much better and had just let all of the media frenzy get the best of her.
"It was just a stupid thing that crossed my mind at that minute," she is quoted as saying. "It's not how I feel now.
"There's nothing wrong with the way I look. I'm not overweight. I'm just not really, really thin. I don't feel that I over-eat, I'm just not someone who wants to live on a diet.”
"As far as I was concerned, I was trying to do something positive, you know, promote women of a larger size and make people feel better about their physical appearance,” Lily said.
“But there were all these photos of me next to Kate and it made me feel a bit shit about myself.
"I felt grotesque. Everyone knows that Kate is one of the most beautiful women in the world and everyone was comparing me directly with her, and I was like 'wait a second, how did this happen?'” (Celebrity Gossip Fashion Blog, 2007).
Lily then spoke out to the press about the pressures women feel to look a certain way and to always be losing weight. She doesn’t regret what she wrote, as she feels it shows how human she is. Everyone goes through up and down days and they are entitled to feel all of the accompanying emotions.
Her sweetest revenge is the fact that she is selling out major venues all over the world and her fan base is growing exponentially. Her popularity is probably due to the fact that she connects with her audiences, not with flashy clothes and a pop star attitude, but with genuine lyrics and a spunky personality. We need more people in the spotlight like her, who will speak out about when they feel injustice.
