She was the voluptuous model famed for her size 14 curves, before dramatically slimming down to a figure many considered too skinny.

Now Sophie Dahl has spoken candidly about her struggles with her weight – and launched a stinging attack on ‘stick-thin starlets’ who set unhealthy and unrealistic  standards for other women.

In an extract from her new cookery book, published in The Mail on Sunday’s You magazine today, she hits out at actresses, models and pop stars who boast about their ‘fictional’ diets, as well as the ‘self-restricted and miserable’ women who follow them.

And she warns: ‘Starving is not sexy. It is bleeding gums, acrid breath, brittle bones, osteoporosis, infertility and complication. It saps and withers.’

In Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights, the 31-year-old granddaughter of novelist Roald Dahl says she is now happy with her figure, but admits she indulged in a ‘season of chocolate cake’ from 17 to 21.

'Food was either a faithful friend or a sin' ... in Sophie's own words

I have always had a passionate relationship with food: passionate in that I loved it blindly or saw it as its own entity, rife with problems.

Back in the old days food was either a faithful friend or a sin, rarely anything in between. I was 18. I had experienced a rather unceremonious exit from school. I had no real idea what I wanted to do, just some vague fantasies involving writing, a palazzo, an adoring Italian, daily love letters and me in a sort of Sophia Loren dress, weaving through a Roman market holding a basket of ripe scented figs.

I had just tried to explain this to my mother over lunch at a restaurant in London. She was not, curiously, sharing my enthusiasm.

‘Enough. You’re going to secretarial college to learn something useful like typing.’

‘But I need to learn about culture!’ She gave me a very beady look.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘No more. End of conversation.’

‘But I…’ The look blackened. I resorted to the historic old faithful between teenagers and their mothers.

‘God… Why don’t you understand me?’ and ran out into the still, grey street sobbing. I threw myself on a doorstep and lit a bitter cigarette. And then something between serendipity and Alice in Wonderland magic happened.

A black taxi chugged to a halt by the doorstep on which I sat. Out of it fell a creature who surpassed my Italian imaginings.

She wore a ship on her head, a miniature galleon with proud sails that billowed in the wind. Her white bosom swelled out of an implausibly tiny corset and she navigated the street in neat steps, teetering on the brink of five-inch heels. Her arms were full to bursting with hat boxes and carrier bags. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know who that is but I want to be her friend.’

I was so fascinated I forgot to cry. I stood up and said, ‘Do you want any help with your bags?’

‘Oh yes, actually you are sitting on my doorstep.’

‘So why were you crying?’ the ship woman said in her bright pink kitchen. It transpired that she was called Isabella Blow, she was contributing editor at Vogue and something of a fashion maverick. We’d put the bags down and she was making tea in a proper teapot.

‘I was crying about my future. My mother doesn’t understand me and I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, it’s so awful.’

‘Don’t worry about that. Pfff!’ she said. ‘Do you want to be a model?’

If it had been a film there would have been the audible ting of a fairy wand. I looked at her incredulously. ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of avoiding the purdah of shorthand. My next question was, ‘Are you sure?’

The ‘Are you sure?’ didn’t spring from some sly sense of modesty; it was brutal realism.

Bar my height, I couldn’t have looked less like a model. I had enormous tits, an even bigger arse and a perfectly round face with plump, smiling cheeks.

The only thing I could have possibly shared with a model was my twisted predilection for chain smoking.

But for sweet Issy, as I came to know her, none of this posed a problem. She saw people as she chose to see them; as grander cinematic versions of themselves.

‘I think,’ she said, her red lips a postbox stamp of approval, ‘you’re like Anita Ekberg.’ I pretended I knew who she was talking about.

‘Ah yes, Anita Ekberg,’ I said.

‘Now put on some lipstick and we’ll go and find your mother and tell her we’ve found you a career.’

We celebrated our fortuitous meeting, with my now mollified mother in tow, at a Japanese restaurant in Mayfair; toasting my possible new career with a wealth of sushi and tempura.

‘Gosh, you do like to eat,’ Issy said, eyes wide, watching as my chopsticks danced over the plate. I would have said yes but my mouth was full.

When I began modelling I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity it carried with it. People had noticed me. Big women from all over the world wrote me congratulatory letters commending my big
bold form.

Newspapers breathlessly reported my strange fleshy phenomenon; a welcome backlash, finally, against the X-ray fashion industry. In the wake of the very angular, it seemed people wanted an anti-waif, a sensual woman who indulged in whatever she wanted.

Every woman in my family had been through a tricky adolescent over-spilling phase. The difference with mine was that it became a matter of public record, rather than something to look back on with tender mirth when presented with a family album.

We always joked as a family about our greediness. We described events by what we ate. There was, and is, a total ease and pleasure around food and cooking.

My first job was being photographed nude by Nick Knight. Like many children, I was accustomed to running around naked in the garden when I was little, and this naked thing turned out to be an accidental theme on and off during the first 22 years of my life.

It became common practice when I was first modelling at 19 or so; a hazardous by-product of my curves, as none of the clothes samples ever fitted me.

Rather than losing weight, as you might expect from all the media focus that had begun to surround my anomalous curviness, I was instead getting rounder and rounder.

I was not cooking, as I had throughout my childhood and adolescence. Instead I would eat lunch and dinner at restaurants, revelling in the grown-up sophistication of it all, ordering appetisers, main courses and puddings.

I remember a sage friend saying, ‘It can’t be good for you eating out all the time – because restaurants want you to come back they’re going to make you the most delicious food in the world, loaded with butter, cream, salt and sugar. They don’t care if you get fat.’

‘Oh no,’ I’d respond, eyes round with greed, ‘they use proper ingredients so it’s not fattening at all.’ With that I’d plough into another round of truffled mashed potatoes laden with butter.

I was the big model. I was meant to eat, a lot. It gave other people hope and cheered them as they enjoyed their chocolate. It was a clumsy way of thinking.

The more I ate, the hungrier I seemed to be. I also felt heavy, down to my bones. I didn’t know how to address it because I felt that if I became thinner it would mean I was a hypocrite, because I had talked so happily on the record about my shape and by getting thinner wouldn’t all of that be negated? Would it mean I was a liar?

It was confusing. I carried on eating; indeed when I ordered two green curries, rice, stir-fried vegetables and soup from the local Thai restaurant I pretended that I had someone over for dinner.

‘Do you want sticky rice, Bob?’ I asked my phantom guest loudly, as if the nice Thai lady on the other end of the phone really cared that I was a glutton.

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In the span of my career and travels I have come across women with extraordinary bodies who aren’t prisoners to frugal eating and self-inflicted misery. These are women who eat sensibly, who might have one day a week featuring some decadent eating and exercise in a way they enjoy.

These women are sexy. They are not necessarily reed thin but what they share is a total appreciation for food and eating and an understanding that whatever their body’s shape or size, they are in command. There is a joy about their being.




















(There is much more to the article: please go read the rest)

Article: HERE







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