Come on in, welcome welcome! I am so pleased that you could all make it to my “Model Fitness and Health” launch party! It’s not going to be a very long party, unfortunately, because the village hall would only rent me the room for ten minutes, but that probably suits you all down to the ground anyway, being the busy people you are!

If you’re all comfortable, then I’d like to start my speech – those of you blocking the fire exit, please move to the left of the room where the goody bags are, and could the owner of the Maroon Vauxhall Corsa please remove it from the front of the building. It’s a drop-off point only!

[Cough cough.]

“It’s so lovely to see you all here – thousands of you, I see, which is both touching and slightly nerve-wracking. It’s a huge responsibility to talk about health and fitness when you’re a model. A fashion model. There’s an incredible amount of bad press surrounding the fashion industry, and I shall be bold and say rightly so. Too many models are far too thin, and most of them that are too thin would probably prefer not to be that thin. The fashion industry perpetuates this need for models to be unhealthily thin, but it’s fashion darling, and they get away with all sorts of things, don’t they?

I am hereby categorically stating that I am not too thin. I am a healthy weight for my height and have had that verified by numerous professionals – I am slim. I have curves – 32D ones up top! – and I eat a well-balanced diet. I have a fondness for wine, but I reign it in for the majority of the time, and indulge it when I need to have fun. I don’t deny myself things that I fancy, but I know when to stop, and I have a few naughty food habits like anybody else. I’d prefer a chickpea curry to a KFC, but on the flip-side, I’d rather eat a bag of Haribo Tang-Fastics than an apple.

I want to try to share my own health and fitness experiences in a responsible and positive way. I’m absolutely prepared to be entirely honest and open about it because I’m trying to do things the healthy way, and I believe that this is a responsible and positive thing to promote. I’m sick of hearing about fad diets that consume people’s minds and cost them money and cannot possibly work in the long-term, and I’m equally sick of (some of) the media’s general irresponsibility over the way that they manipulate women’s ideas concerning body image. On page one they have celebrities that look too skinny, and on page eleven, celebrities that have put on weight. On page thirty five, they have a double-paged spread about their worry over models being too thin, but they then book a model who has arms thick with hair and who pukes her lunch up on the shoot.

This ‘Fitness and Health’ isn’t supposed to be a rant about weight issues, though – in fact, that’s exactly what I don’t want it to be. I just want to document my Fitness and Health discoveries and share my tips and tricks, and I sincerely hope that at least a few of you will find them useful. The only reason that I have decided to finally produce this section of the website is because the interest in my health and fitness has been so huge – I have had literally thousands of emails and comments requesting this very information. I have also had a good number of emails that have disturbed me – girls as young as thirteen – wanting to know how to be thinner, how to eat less, how to exercise more without building muscle. It was actually these (very sad) emails that made the decision for me; if I can change people’s way of thinking about their bodies and how to maintain them, then that will be simply marvelous.

I have to keep in shape for my job – I wouldn’t get work if I didn’t look my best, and that includes having a reasonably toned body – but there is a huge difference between being fit, healthy and toned, and being a skinny model;  I really want to stress that this section is IN NO WAY about ‘getting a size zero figure’ – it’s about responsible health and fitness.

In this section I will be giving you a sort of ‘access all areas’ (or most areas!) pass to my diet, fitness and health. I’ll be telling you my honest feelings about my body and my exercise regime (which is at the moment non-existent, part of a little experiment I have been doing – more on that later!) and including any relevant measurements and reports from health officials. I’ll include the odd recipe, the odd food diary, the odd illustrative snapshot so that you can see how (and if!) my body changes due to exercise and diet. I’m really hoping that this section is going to be hugely helpful to anyone looking to get fit and live a healthier lifestyle, but I’m also hoping that it’s going to be an enormous amount of fun. Very strange things seem to happen to me in gyms so there could be some quite weird and wonderful anecdotes coming your way….”