Amy Winehouse: New Poster Girl For Anorexia?

I did wonder if Amy had an eating disorder and while everyone made a fuss about her drug abuse, she really may have succumbed as a result of eating disorders rather than drugs. Yesterday, writing in the Times, Caitlin Moran described how little Amy ate (just Haribos, it seems) and how much exercise she did (treadmill for hours apparently). Moran writes “with an eating disorder like that, you’d have all the tolerance for drink and drugs of a newborn baby”.

Winehouse’s eating disorder was as clear as the nose on your face, it hardly matters whether it was anorexia or bulimia, the damage can be just as bad. Drugs are nirvana for people with eating disorders because you just don’t get hungry. When you go into rehab, you just feel fat when the drugs wear off, or you get very hungry as their effect starts to wane. This makes recovery feel very unsafe, so having eating problems gets in the way of being on the wagon.

Why do I feel cross; Winehouse was the queen of cool for some people, the girl on the edge, who wasn’t supposed to care what people thought. But all the time, behind that bravado, her real pain was the pain of everyone else who has an eating problem, the wish for absolute conformity by being as thin as all the other poster girls like… Cheryl Cole. I wish she had the courage to come clean about it, to help those she has left behind.