Spinach For Lunch? Way To Promote Eating Disorders, Daily Mail.
March 16, 2010 2 Comments
Amanda Seyfried, probably best known for her role as Sophie in Mamma Mia, apparently only eats spinach for lunch.
I’m hoping this is a journalistic exaggeration of the truth because if she only eats spinach and exercises a lot then surely she would be collapsing on a regular basis.
When asked in an interview what she eats for lunch she said, “Yesterday for lunch? Spinach. Just spinach. Spinach and some seeds”.
She also told them that she exercises regularly: “If I didn’t run and work out, there’s no way I would be this thin…but I have to stay in shape because I’m an actress. It’s fucked up and it’s twisted, but I wouldn’t get the roles otherwise”.
On the surface this sounds good; salad and exercise, great!
But I’m willing to bet she eats more than just spinach. Maybe she does have a raw food diet, but that would involve eating mounds and mounds of vegetables to keep her energy up.
If she is fit in a healthy way then she would need to eat a fair amount of food to keep up the exercise without collapsing. And although she is thin, she doesn’t quite look anorexic (I know, I know, you can’t tell just by looking at someone). And women can look as good as her and eat a lot more than she claims to.
It is irresponsible to print this kind of information that might encourage eating disorders in other girls wanting to be movie stars.
This information does come from the Daily Mail, which is not exactly the highest quality newspaper, so perhaps they are missing some details here. I certainly hope so. If not, then Amanda needs to get to a hospital quick before she collapses.
She might engage in crash dieting for parts (which is something a lot of actresses do), but she is totally at a normal weight for her height. I don’t think she would fit the criteria for anorexia (it’s pretty obvious when someone is clinically underweight), but she might exhibit disordered eating. Or, she might just realize that she has to maintain a certain body type/body size while filming movies, whether she feels satisfied with her weight or not. It sounds like the latter, honestly. There are plenty of actresses who ‘let themselves go’ (in the eyes of Hollywood) while they aren’t filming, and then scramble to lose weight for roles. Remember Christian Bale’s apple + can of tuna diet for the Machinist? Now that was scary.
I kinda agree. She’s lost a fair amount of weight since her Mean Girls/early Big Love days, but she’s hardly the poster child I would choose to highlight Hollywood’s obsession with unhealthy body image.
My bigger problem is with the Daily Mail, because clearly someone in Amanda’s camp paid the paper a bunch of money to advertise her “enviably slimmer figure.”