At last, the mystery of why superlative supermodel Naomi Campbell throws such filthy tantrums has been solved.
Campbell may insist (as she told Oprah this week) that she has a "type of emotional disorder … an abandonment issue", which leads her to lash out, but by the sounds of things she's so goddamned hungry all the time she'd have to be a saint to keep her composure – an empty tummy could make the best of us kick a pigeon or shoulderbarge a pensioner.
Three times a year, Campbell revealed, she goes on the maple syrup diet – which isn't so much a diet as self-flagellation minus the scourge. It involves drinking nothing but said syrup mixed with cayenne pepper, lemon juice and water. When Beyoncé did it, losing the equivalent of a small child in body weight for the film Dreamgirls, she also drank laxative tea every night and a draught of lukewarm sea-salt water in the morning. "The most I've ever done it for is 18 days," quoth La Campbell. "So I started on Sunday. This is my sixth day." Oprah was lucky. Day nine and merely raising the issue of her tantrums might have led things to get ugly.
Yes, it all suddenly makes sense. Campbell, who was once accused of hitting her assistant in the face with a BlackBerry phone, and was arrested by police after she allegedly spat at a police officer at Heathrow, was probably on one of her mad diets. If only she had stood up at her trial and confessed that her boyfriend commands her to forgo carbs, any lady who's got through to lunch on the Atkins' diet would have let her off with a voucher to Pizza Hut.
"If there is bread on the table, he's like, 'don't eat bread,' she said, gazing at [oligarch Vladimir] Doronin, who smiled from the front row of the audience during the interview."
Campbell is a strong, powerful woman. Bread or no bread, she'd still be breathtaking. But she's not the only celebrity engaging in increasingly crazed regiles. Cheryl Cole eats according to her blood-type – it's called the Eat Right 4 Your Type diet — which can only lead one to the conclusion that the pop princess's gullibility cells are as active as her thyroid. Actress Kirsten Dunst apparently follows a diet that consists 70% alkaline foods and 30% acid. Jennifer Aniston allegedly downed a glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice first thing every morning but has now embarked on a new baby food diet. Liz Hurley famously lived on a bowl of cabbage soup a day. Hollywood starlet Megan Fox guzzles a cider vinegar cocktail, while popstar Fergie does it in shots.
I've just been reading Janusz Bardach's Man is Wolf to Man, and am considering becoming a diet guru myself – proposing the gulag diet (1 x head of salted herring, 12 x hours of sawing down trees. No water. 500g of bread at the end of it = red-carpet-ready bone visibility guaranteed within one week).
The awful thing about these diets is the joylessness of them. The sheer, sapping unhappiness they must involve. And it's not just lady starlets who follow these horrifying mantras. Art collector Charles Saatchi lost four stone in 2008. "It took me 10 months of eating only eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner to shift it. I am still not much to look at, but I have become cringingly vain and hold the world record for the highest level of cholesterol ever seen in anyone still with a pulse." One chef suggested that though he was a fan of all kinds of eggs, Saatchi must either have been joking or require a psychiatrist immediately.
"It has to be a sort of punishment," reads the preface to a book detailing fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's diet tips. (Lagerfeld, having dropped pounds upon pounds on a diet of horsemeat, diet cola, and disgusting recipes like calf's liver with wild strawberries). "You are a general and you have a single soldier in your army. You must give him instructions and he must carry them out. It may annoy him but he has no choice."
Campbell needs to put the syrup away and embrace the bread basket. And for the rest of us, just thinking about not having to eat strawberry flavoured calf's liver must lead to a greater love of the nation's bingo wings and muffin tops – for they speak eloquently of cake and cream and all good things, of a life lived free of body fascism and the sort of self-hate that leads one to subsist on eggs alone.
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