Who’s going to listen to the fat girl anyway?
The Substack of Shame: More words than the Circle of Shame, less cellulite
You know how Facebook Memories will thrust your old status update from 2007 into your face and you cringe because you can’t believe it was actually you who said that? That’s how I sometimes feel when I see a copy of heat magazine from 20 years ago. Did I really write that stuff?
That was the big question when I was interviewed for Alex Light and Em Clarkson’s brilliant body image podcast series, which you can listen to here — but in short, the answer was yes, yes I did. And the really long answer? Well, read on (and read the other piece I wrote about it a year or so ago, too!).
Working at heat magazine from 2003 to 2009 was, in many ways, a pleasure and a privilege. But there’s no denying now, through our older, wiser, woker 2025 eyes, that it was also toxic and problematic. It just all seemed so silly and trivial at the time. When I chat to old colleagues, a handful of whom have become lifelong friends, we do all wonder: how the fuck did we get away with any of it? And I don’t just mean the content, but the ways of working: filthy desks, loud music, X-rated conversations, disgusting hangovers… it’s a miracle we got a magazine out every Tuesday, let alone one that won multiple awards and sold upwards of 600,000 copies a week. To quote one of the magazine’s most popular — and consistently funny — pages: What were you thinking?
I know how I got away with it. My superpower and/or toxic trait is that I can write faster than I can speak and possibly faster than I can think. Basically, my brain is in my fingers. It’s why I rarely paint my nails, the friction chips it off instantly.
We used to play a game on the news desk of “how fast can you write a Week In Pictures?”. There were pages of Week in Pictures pieces (“WIPs”) at the beginning of every issue, and each one was usually around 175 words — essentially a dragged-out picture caption — and I took pride in being able to write one in under three minutes. Obviously I’d make it look like it took longer, and then spend 45 minutes browsing cute indie boys on MySpace.
Needless to say, not much thought or analysis went into these pages, but that wasn’t the assignment. Instead, we would start with a picture, often something as innocuous as someone from EastEnders walking down the street carrying a Sainsbury’s bag, and try and think of something funny to say about it. “Who, what, where” wasn’t enough, we needed to bring in some “why” or, better still, an element of “what the fuck?”.
There were a few tropes and rules — a silly one that springs to mind is that if we wrote about Will Young we had to allude to him being posh (“what-oh Will!”) — and some of them were bitchy but some of them were, genuinely, even now, in the cold light of 2025, smart and funny. Sometimes, though, it was tough to come up with an angle. You knew a writer had been desperately trying to pad out the word-count if the pay-off line at the end was something meaningless and insipid like “You go girl!”.
Whatever we came up with would be printed, often verbatim, in the issue that came out a few days later. I remember one of the sub-editors — these are the talented, often under-appreciated, people who fix typos, chop copy around and generally make everything more articulate and legally sound, while the writers take all the glory — disclosing over a drink that he had a secret “bad writing folder” where, for his own satisfaction, he’d keep print-outs of the worst copy he’d had to spruce up.
He told me that I had only made it into his folder of shame once. And, because it still kills me to this day, I remember vividly that it was something I’d written in a rush about Ruben Studdard from American Idol, having not actually watched it. Slag off my shoes, bitch about my bum, but god forbid you come for my CRAFT.
My point is, pages needed to be filled, fast, and everything we produced had to be sharp, funny and/or provocative and offer a different angle to a picture or story readers might have already seen in the papers or even on this emerging thing called the internet. If any of it was badly written, the subs — some of the kindest, cleverest, and most long-suffering people on the team — would fix it.
Week after week, stuff was put out to hundreds of thousands of gossip-hungry teens and 20-somethings that had been written at pace, mostly by someone very young earning less than 20K a year, but who was enjoying the status (and freebies) that came with having a cool job. I mentioned on the podcast that, at the time, everyone in the industry wanted to work at heat and, in fact, over the years I’ve heard a few journalists speaking in quite a superior way about mags like heat, while secretly knowing they were clamouring for work there at the time. I remember looking at some of their CVs!
heat, by the way, still exists. At last circulation count, the print edition was selling around 85,000 copies a week, but it’s much bigger as a digital brand, and they write a lot about telly, just as we always did. But when people think about heat, they mostly just remember the bodies and the bitchy captions, specifically in sections like the now infamous “Circle of Shame”. But, in my 6.5 years there, as well as churning out thousands upon thousands of words about people’s bodies, faces and outfits, I also wrote the much-loved “Spotted” spread (it was always fun to try and figure out which celebrities had tried to plant their sightings themselves), the “On or Off?” column (who’s shagging who, who is no longer shagging, lots of synonyms for shagging), the “Say What?” page (pithy comments on celebrity quotes), the “Celebrity Pet of the Week” section (I don’t think this requires further explanation), plus numerous TV, book and music reviews and a few big interviews, although for me the stress of doing these always outweighed the enjoyment.
To answer a question that has little to do with this piece but that people always ask, even 20 years on, the celebrities I liked the most when I interviewed them were Sara Cox, Zoe Ball, Darius Danesh and — I’m sorry, please forgive me; as with so much of this stuff, we didn’t know then what we know now — Russell Brand. My worst interviews were with X Factor’s Ray Quinn — painfully media-trained to the point of muteness; in hindsight, he was 18 and probably petrified — and Simon Amstell, who just didn’t like journalists (BUT WAIT WE’RE SO LOVELY!).
Was any of this crucial, hard-hitting journalism? Not so much. Was it often funny, entertaining, irreverent, uplifting and, for better or for worse, era-defining? Yes! Because we were getting talked about so much and fighting off the celebrities and their publicists who were desperate to be in the magazine, we also thought we were doing important work: holding celebrities to account, encouraging people to think about things differently, making normal women feel better about themselves (ha!) etc.
Every job has shit parts and I think a lot of us there at the time felt like the body stuff was our penance for getting to do all the fun, frivolous bits that took up most of our days and nights. Zooming in on someone’s stretch marks was nobody’s reason for going into journalism, but it was what sold, and ultimately what allowed us to stay employed.
You might ask how some of those bitchy, body-bashing captions got through so many people — writers, picture editors, designers, sub-editors, section editors, editors, publishers, ads people — without someone questioning it all on an ethical level, out loud. Why didn’t I say something, if I felt so uncomfortable about all this? And am I just pretending to feel icky about it now, because it feels like the right thing to do?
Great questions (yeah, I wrote them). While hindsight definitely helps, I remember vividly that I did feel icky when I wrote copy about people’s bodies and I did feel icky every time I saw a body-centric cover of heat, whether it was outwardly negative in the earlier ‘00s or faux-celebratory later on.
But, while the senior people on the magazine were always really receptive, encouraging and nurturing, very much all ears to ideas from us littluns, I fundamentally felt like my reservations about the content were just because I was fat, and alone in my fatness, which the appetite for this stuff from the publisher and the readers seemed to back up. I also felt that if I voiced those reservations to the people around me — above me — they would also think I only felt like that because I was fat. Because who would ever listen to the fat girl anyway?
Everyone around me was thin. Living in London — I’d also been at uni in London and really struggled with what I’d now define as “social anxiety” but at the time was more like “why am I so awkward and weird?” — and working in the media, I didn’t know any other 22 year olds who couldn’t shop at Topshop, and being able to buy clothes from Topshop was a shorthand for being slim and accepted.
When I went on an insane diet, lost 5 stone and could just about get into a Topshop size 12, I realised I didn’t like it that much anyway. Even as a child, I hated it when other people had the same clothes as me, so why would I even want to shop there? As a 40-something, I have my own sense of style — ”slutty Minnie Mouse” and “disgraced kids TV presenter” are two ways it’s been described over the years — and don’t feel like I need to look like everyone else. Even though I absolutely devoured magazines from the age of eight, I always flipped past the fashion pages: I found them boring because it was clear that none of it was meant for me. It’s just that life is easier when you have the option.
In my next job, editing the celebrity gossip website at the Daily Mirror from 2009 to 2011, I still wrote judgy stuff about celebrities (I mean, the strapline was “gossip gone toxic”), but now, as a slightly more grown-up woman of 28 (!), I implemented a policy of not commenting negatively on their bodies. Their clothes, hair, work, interviews, relationships etc were all fair game for a pisstake, though, so I’m not looking for a sainthood here, but it did feel like slight progress. We tried to take the things people loved about heat — the sideways view, the cynicism, the humour — without the body parts but, when there’s a team of largely young people bashing out content all day, not everything passed the quality control test.
It’s all much worse now. Writers at Mail Online who probably, like me, embarked on careers in the media because it was cool, creative, and maybe a bit glamorous, or because writing was really the only thing they’d ever been good at, are under enormous pressure to churn out dozens of stories every day, there’s no time for it to go through a sub-editor, and in order for the articles to be seen as authoritative by Google algorithms and have space for enough pictures and, of course, ads, the word counts often extend into the thousands, for what is effectively just bad shots of someone off the telly spending a couple of hours on the beach. Barely relevant biographical information is dredged up and shoehorned in, chunks from previous stories are copied and pasted, and perhaps a house price is needlessly quoted. Those 150 word captions from 2005 seem pretty quaint in comparison. You go girl!
One thing that Em and Alex discuss on the podcast is how celebrities were “dehumanised” which I think is really interesting — and true. This sounds appalling to our 2025 ears, but thinking of famous people as actual humans with feelings just wasn’t even a thing. When we were putting together heat, we weren’t thinking about the celebrities much at all, we were thinking about the readers and what they wanted to see. The stars were really just a revolving cast of characters.
The thing is, nobody called us out on our shit, they applauded it. So on we went, obliviously, upping the ante every week because there were only so many “best and worst beach bodies” covers before it started to feel a bit stale and we needed a new angle — especially as there were now at least five other celeb weeklies publishing the same stuff too. Every few months, we’d try something fresh on the cover, something smarter or more celebratory, but those issues often bombed. So, the pressure mounted to think of more inventive ways to scrutinise people’s bits. For a long time, putting the word SKINNY on the cover was a guaranteed hit; it didn’t really matter who we were talking about or what was going on with them.
Celebrities generally only complain if the media publishes something legally questionable, which happens way less than most people think due to those aforementioned sub-editors being really good at their jobs. And, just as a star who didn’t like their “cankles” being highlighted probably wouldn’t bother going through the palaver of saying anything, even if it had made them cry, it would be too much bother for readers to pipe up about anything that made them feel uncomfortable too. It’s why letters pages were often made up.
It became complicated when the celebrities who sold magazines were no longer untouchable A-listers who would never even see a copy, but homegrown stars who hadn’t even been famous five minutes ago but really wanted to be in heat, because they were also avid readers. Many of heat’s top-selling issues during my time there had Jade Goody on the cover. As a magazine, we loved Jade, championed her from the start of Big Brother, and knew that readers enjoyed seeing a working class British girl find success — especially because her body was also more relatable.
The tabloid newspapers at the time called Jade a “pig” amongst other things — she was probably a size 12, but this was the size zero era — which is one reason she preferred selling her exclusive interviews to heat. In the two decades since, we’ve seen countless reality TV stars become household names, but at the time Jade was a breath of fresh air and signalled a new era of celebrity cellulite by way of Margate, not Malibu. And it was the start of celebrities becoming more human; the era we’re still in now.
In this new era — which coincidentally was the name of the cafe directly behind “heat towers” where I would eat chips and dissect bad dates with my colleagues, one of whom was bridesmaid at my wedding and another of whom is godfather to my son — both consumers and celebrities have an outlet: social media. If you write something mean about someone now, there will be a reaction: if not from the subject themselves, but from their fans. Social media has many flaws but it has democratised a lot of this stuff. Getting your publicist to make an angry phone or call or send an email or fax — yes, when I joined heat, there was still a busy fax machine! — was not worth the hassle, but whacking something up on X or Instagram Stories takes seconds and will be seen by the whole world, not just an editorial assistant.
Now, thanks to social media, I know that millions of young women felt just as isolated in their bodies as I did, even if they were technically small enough to shop at Topshop. I wasn’t the only overweight, socially-awkward 22 year old in London in 2003 after all, and now I can open up Instagram whenever I want and see dozens of women with bodies more like mine wearing nice clothes. We even have a name: midsize!
During my time at heat, I was occasionally approached to be a talking head on TV shows. I always said no. And for a long time, if I knew there was a team photo going in the magazine, I would panic about it for days in advance and orchestrate it so that I was at the back (which is tricky to pull off when you’re 5’4”). I felt too ashamed of my body to let the readers see me and clock that someone so unattractive was writing that bitchy stuff, plus my PE teacher’s insistence that I “go and stand at the back with the other chubby ones” was always ringing in my ears. When I lost a significant amount of weight, I was happy to be the centre of attention; all those years of hiding is probably why I’m an obnoxious show-off now, regardless of my weight in any given month.
Of course, celebrities didn’t have the option of hiding. As far as heat, and the other magazines and tabloids of the time were concerned, they had signed up to be the centre of attention at all times, which meant being papped in their bikinis. These days, people go onto reality shows knowing that they will be scrutinised and assuming they’re thick-skinned enough to deal with it, — many of them have already experienced a version of it as influencers first — but I doubt Jade Goody had really considered this when she applied to Big Brother.
What we’ve seen in the years that have followed all this is celebrities, and especially social media types like Em and Alex, reclaiming what the magazines of the ‘00s started and taking back control. They make Reels showing off their cellulite or stomach rolls, they show us what they look like without makeup and from different camera angles, and in doing so they provide a lot of reassurance and solidarity to the women who follow them, and who far outnumber the trolls. I’m naively hoping that at some point, nobody feels the need to do all this either; that it all just stops being a talking point at all. There are far more interesting, positive things to talk about, which is kind of the point
— writer of my favourite body image Substack — makes here (but I’d already written 3000 words of this when she posted it, so…).Plus, since all the other shit still exists in different packages, moving on feels a way off. We’re still bombarded with images of social media stars and celebrities who are filtered up to the eyeballs, the modern version of the airbrushed Vogue covers, many of them trying to sell us stuff to make us look less old/fat/rubbish, while the Mail Online is still pumping out the body-shaming stories, snidely talking about stars “putting on leggy displays” and “pouring their curves” into swimwear and pondering who has “Ozempic face”.
The difference is, now we can indulge covertly without spending money on a magazine or labelling ourselves as a consumer of this stuff. During the golden era of heat, being seen with a copy of the magazine in public was a badge of honour — it meant you were cool, funny, part of the in crowd, probably someone who shopped at Topshop. Then, it became a guilty pleasure you might sneak a glance at the hairdressers. Now? We don’t need to buy a magazine to ogle celebrity bodies: we can do it for free online and pretend it never happened.
Would people on social media and on reality shows feel the need to filter and sculpt themselves into blowup dolls if it hadn’t been for heat and its contemporaries, in both the UK and US, exploiting the flaws of the ‘00s generation? Maybe not — but would we have exploited these flaws if it hadn’t been for the ‘90s media before that making us all feel bad with excessive airbrushing and supposed “girl next door” glamour models? It’s this long, twisted, ever-evolving story of body image history that Em and Alex are exploring on the podcast and, if you enjoyed reading this, I recommend you give it a listen. And then maybe, just maybe, we can all try to figure out together how to fix it?
And no, I’m not going to end on a “you go girl!” but the sentiment is there.