“Are you the one who put the circles around the cellulite?”
Who’s in the mood for 2700 words on what it was like to work at heat magazine during the height of celebrity body image madness?
When people find out that I was a writer at heat magazine for six years in the noughties, there’s a predictable series of questions.
Who’s the most famous person you met? I’ve met lots of people who were among the most famous people in the country for brief periods of time (think Jade Goody, Katie Price, Simon Cowell, and pretty much everyone who went on X Factor and Big Brother when they were worth watching) but this was heat, not Vanity Fair, and I was pretty junior, so I didn’t get to meet many legit international superstars, sorry. And now I can’t even name-drop interviewing Russell Brand anymore.
Did you get loads of free stuff? Quite a bit. If you want the really good shit you have to work on the fashion desk, but I did get lots of tickets to things. Annoyingly though my mortgage advisor wasn’t that impressed that I’d been to the premieres of High School Musical 2 and 3.
And… Are you the one who put the circles around the cellulite? No. That would have been a designer, because in the noughties people on magazines didn’t have to do ten different jobs. But I did sometimes write the captions about the cellulite and that is… worse?
I started at heat on work experience in 2002 while doing a post-grad journalism course. If imposter syndrome had a patient zero, I’m pretty sure it was me, rocking up to heat towers in a hideous size 20 purple trouser suit from Dorothy Perkins. On my first day I was sent to the Q Awards where I was seated next to some friendly chaps who I thought were music execs, but turned out to be the cast of The League Of Gentlemen.
Then, a few months later, on my 22nd birthday, heat, amazingly, offered me an actual paid permanent job, on the news desk, although “news” was stuff like “here is a cute photo of Justin Timberlake walking his dog.” It’s fair to say I have never broken a proper story in my life.
I’d always said I wanted to be a music journalist, but the “music” fanzine I ran with my best friend Nicky as a teenager (Teletext’s fanzine of the week, no less) featured just as much writing about Hollyoaks and nail varnish as Super Furry Animals, so really heat was my spiritual home.
As someone who felt shy and socially awkward throughout school and uni, and often on the outside looking in - this is a bit of a writer thing, right? - to be handed a job at my favourite magazine - everyone’s favourite magazine at the time - writing about all the stuff I loved was just… utterly ridiculous and beyond my wildest dreams.
Especially because I was FAT. And fat girls didn’t work at celebrity magazines did they?
They did not. I was the biggest person in the office by at least four dress sizes. I was also the palest, and weirdly that bothered me more. This was the St Tropez fake tan era, and I hated the look and smell of it and what I felt it represented - the fake, shallow celebrity culture that I still felt peripheral to, despite now being at the heart of it. My boss actually sent me home with a bottle of it once (she was being generous, and not just on a mission to paint the whole office orange) but I ended up giving it away.
The money was rubbish, but the job was mostly amazing. I got to work with some incredibly talented, creative and hilarious people and spend every minute of my working day doing what I loved - writing thousands upon thousands of words about people and relationships and TV and music - and make some of the most important friendships of my life.
To which you might be thinking: good for you, but did you, in fact, write a load of really mean stuff about people’s bodies, and yet now, 20 years later, you’re peddling a Substack hooked off people being really mean about your body?
Shit, is this therapy?
A year or so in, I dumped my long-term boyfriend and lost a couple of stone on WeightWatchers and to celebrate “Isabel’s Amazing New Look!” some colleagues sorted me out with a free haircut at a fancy Mayfair salon.
Years later, I lost LOADS more weight and felt like - and enjoyed being - the office science experiment. My colleagues quizzed me about my diet, showered me with compliments, sent me shopping with their press discount cards, lent me their clothes and even bought me presents.
These sisterly acts came from such a nice, kind, genuine place (and who doesn’t want a free fancy haircut?) but did perpetuate the lifelong feeling that being slimmer had more value.
But how could anyone existing in a female body in the noughties, let alone working at a celebrity magazine in the noughties, not feel like that?
When I think about some of the stuff I wrote at heat, I feel really proud. A lot of it was really fucking funny. The magazine was era-defining like Smash Hits and Just 17 before it, and I was in the thick of it. At the time, it was the toast of the industry and sold well over half a million copies a week. I won an award for my writing and it felt like the magazine won awards most weeks. The office in Covent Garden was joyfully noisy (20 years later I still can’t function if I have to work in silence), spilling over with crap and crawling with mice. We tried to get them to stay under our desks whenever Dermot O’Leary popped by.
Ostensibly, we poked fun at celebrities for things they had said, done and worn. Often, they were in on the joke. Lots of them were absolutely desperate to be in heat. But the thing that really sold magazines in their many hundreds of thousands wasn’t quite so matey and harmless. It was the stuff they didn’t want to be part of: the drawing attention to their supposed “flaws”.
It was a brand of journalism borrowed from the US - stars, they’re just like us! - but it was toxic. If anyone wrote those captions now they would be cancelled in seconds.
The problem was, the “embarrassing” beach bodies and the “stars without makeup” and, yes, the cellulite and “muffin tops” highlighted on the infamous “circle of shame” page really did the numbers, so the people running the show obviously wanted more of it. It was a highly competitive market and we couldn’t buy up an exclusive chat with Preston and Chantelle every week. Slapping a load of paparazzi photos of people’s bums, bumps and bunions on the cover was failsafe and cheap.
Of course, women were bitchy about other women’s bodies, and their own bodies, before celebrity magazines. And they continue to be now, when celebrity magazines no longer do big business or drive the narrative.
But, looking back, all that zooming in on flaws, putting them in print and then marketing it at girls in their teens and twenties is hard to, well, stomach. Seeing a celebrity’s stretch marks doesn’t actually make anyone feel good, does it? Does it not just make us think that if we go to the beach, people are going to stare at our stretch marks too?
It didn’t feel like any of the team on the magazine loved this reality, but, as with so many things that go on in the world and only seem outrageous in hindsight, we were obviously all complicit in it. It felt like the general vibe was “come for the cellulite, stay for the great writing” without anyone really thinking about the bigger picture of how this affected both the celebrities caught at an unflattering angle and the readers who longed to look like them anyway.
It felt more problematic for me when some of the stars in question were clearly not in a good way. The “scary skinny” stories that began to dominate the media were much darker than the ones about people’s double chins, but had one spawned the other - was it partly our fault that they’d felt the need to change their bodies in the first place?
And yet the only time I refused to write something was when some pictures came in of a famous actress with scars on her arms as if she had been self-harming. Most of the time, if we weren’t happy to put our names to stuff, we’d just invent a pseudonym. Yep, you’re looking at Mary Levine: my middle name + I really fancied Adam Levine from Maroon 5 at the time. Mary Levine was as caustic as they come - although the only thing I vividly remember writing as Mary was that Sarah Jessica Parker looked “more circus freak than quirky chic.” Just because it rhymes doesn’t mean it’s right, Mary.
It wasn’t just heat, of course. It was everywhere. We’re told this is a product of women being naturally bitchy and putting down other women, and yet it’s Chris Evans we see weighing Victoria Beckham on TFI Friday and Simon Cowell telling an average-sized X Factor hopeful she could go through to the next round if she lost weight. Quite a few of the people in suits pulling the strings at heat towers, panicking about sales figures and asking for more beach body covers, were men too.
Talented men, funny men, often very nice men - but still men, who can never fully understand the reality of owning a female body in a world like this.
So, as ever, the men were behind the wheel while the women on the bus went chatter chatter chatter. And, whether they were a famous person living it, a journalist writing about it or a reader lapping it all up, our collective self-esteem plummeted.
The thing I find interesting is that fitness and wellbeing were rarely part of the conversation then - both between friends and colleagues and in the stories about celebrity bodies. In the early noughties, I don’t remember anyone cycling to work or going for a run. If they did, they were a bit wacky. I do recall people talking about the gym, but using words like “torture” rather than it being something they enjoyed; the only reason to exercise was to burn calories, not to be strong or healthy. And in the magazine we mainly only wrote about fitness at new year, when all the celeb workout DVDs would come out. By summer, they’d be papped looking “curvy” again in bikinis, and so the cycle continued.
Diets like Atkins were the big thing at the time and carbs were the devil. But I used to eat buttery pasta at my desk while everyone else nibbled on salad - before we all devoured the many doughnuts and cupcakes and brownies that would be sent in by PRs. What’s funny though is that since leaving heat I’ve worked for broadsheets, tabloids, multiple other magazines, several start-ups and a few marketing agencies and, as a workplace, heat was among the least bitchy. Despite me feeling that I stuck out like a sore thumb, nobody at work ever said anything mean about my body, at least not to my face.
Once, I was sent to interview plus-size Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus, where we were to chat about her “finally finding love”.
Nobody said it out loud, but I knew the editors had chosen me because I might make Michelle feel more comfortable. That was cool with me - it was a big interview, and I didn’t often get to do those.
The interview was fine - Michelle was perfectly nice, in that bland way that all talent show stars are when they’ve had so much media training that their real personality has been completely erased - but something felt off. We later found out that the “boyfriend” she had exclusively revealed was just a male friend, and they’d fabricated the whole thing. Maybe it was for money, or maybe it was because Michelle was absolutely fed up with the focus on her body and wanted something else to talk about, to show she was more than just the token big girl on primetime telly, and that someone was attracted to her. Can you blame her?
If I’m honest though, physically I felt so far removed from both the celebrities in the magazine and most of the other women in the industry at the time that on a personal level I felt relatively unscathed by most of this stuff.
I wasn’t bothered about cellulite, it wasn’t even on my radar and seemed so trivial - a skinny girl problem! - so perhaps that’s why I didn’t think too deeply about drawing attention to it, and other minor perceived flaws, in celebrities. I was more bothered about not being able to buy clothes in my size on the high street.
But I have good friends who feel battered and broken from working in the media during this period, or just living through it. I think size zero culture and celebrity body-shaming were much more damaging to those who felt like if they just tried a bit harder they could be as thin and flawless as the stars, without considering that it was literally their job to look perfect, or that they were on permanent diets, or drugs. And this was never me. The idea that I could ever look remotely like Kate Moss or Nicole Richie was preposterous, and I didn’t want to anyway. I was happy to just get to a size 14 so I could buy nice clothes more easily.
Funnily enough I went back to heat to freelance as a proper grown-up, and a size 14, in my early thirties. By now the tide had turned to be more body positive. The photos were the same, but the copy had taken a different tone. The week I was there the cover was going to be “Size 14 stars hit the beach” but I thought it was ridiculous. The argument from the top was that it was celebratory. The argument from me was that it was bollocks. The stars in question included Beyonce and Kim Kardashian. Basically, fit, slim women with curvy hips but who were never, in a million years, anything approaching a size 14. “But it’s relatable and will make women feel good!” said the men. “No it won’t. If you’re actually a size 14 you’re either going to think “what a load of shit” or “why don’t I look like that?” said me and quite a few others in the office, but they ran it anyway. From 1950s advertising to 1980s glamour models to 1990s lads mags to 2000s celebrity gossip to 2020s influencer culture, ultimately women’s bodies make money, and the words that go with them aren’t the important bit.
In some ways I’m glad I’m 42, and not 22, now. Growing up on social media is surely far more damaging than growing up with celebrity magazines, and don’t get me started on Love Island (I mean, you can’t, I’ve never watched it).
But I do think that, on the whole, the 22 year olds of today have slightly more positive and inclusive views when it comes to body image, and have come of age with a wider variety of influences. If I walk into a magazine office in 2023, not everyone looks like they could be in Atomic Kitten.
Now there are people who run, people who lift weights, people who cycle to work and unashamedly wolf down a croissant, people who’ve found cool clothes in a size 18 and look great in them. Sure, many of them still have confidence issues, and shaky mental health, but these days they’re not afraid to talk about it. The younger ones are also genuinely flabbergasted and horrified when they see how we used to talk about celebrity bodies. And I honestly can’t remember the last time I heard anyone worrying about cellulite.
Loved this! "“But it’s relatable and will make women feel good!” said the men." I LAUGHED. Great piece x
Loved reading this. So much nostalgia but also disbelief that this was our norm. I’m aware of the shift but it was refreshing to see with such clarity that it’s no wonder we can be so mean to ourselves about our bodies.