21

DEAR BODY

I love you and I promise to take care of you. I bet there were quite a few years when you never thought you’d hear me say that, let alone actually do it.

Going back to the beginning of this love/hate relationship: The joke in our house was always that Dad hid his drugs in the oven because that was the last place anyone in the family would look. Except it wasn’t a joke because it was true—there wasn’t a whole lot of cooking going on in our house.

When we were on tour, we mostly ate catered food. In some cities, the catering would be amazing, but in most it was whatever could be prepared easily to feed a thousand people. The bus kitchen was just a microwave, so as you can imagine, fresh salads and homemade meals were not in abundance.

When I was growing up, there weren’t a ton of working mothers, and if there were, they certainly didn’t work as hard as ours, so I think Mum felt a lot of pressure. Whenever she thought there was something she couldn’t teach us, whether that was because of her schedule or because it was something she didn’t know much about, she didn’t expect us to just figure it out. Instead, she’d leave it to the professionals and send us somewhere where we could get the information.

This was how my brother, sister, and I found ourselves sitting in a nutritionist’s office. I was ten and hated that woman immediately. The first thing she did was ask to see my nails, to check if I had a calcium deficiency. I didn’t even know what calcium was. Then she asked me if, when I took a shit, was it a floater, a drifter, or a sinker? I didn’t know! I was doing most of my dumping in truck stops—I wasn’t stopping to study it! I was mostly worried about whether I’d found a bathroom with a locking door.

That woman wanted to talk about shit, and she was full of it. Everything she taught us was about counting calories, the same kind of super-restrictive stuff you read on pro-ana websites, like, “If you’re eating a salad, always get the dressing on the side. Make sure it’s fat-free, and then dip your fork in the dressing before you pick up the lettuce.” Can you imagine telling a kid that? You’d send them straight to counseling. Even at ten, I called BS on the whole thing and didn’t follow her rules.

For most of my life, nutrition wasn’t something I thought about. I didn’t understand fruits or vegetables, and the concept of a healthy lifestyle was completely foreign to me. I didn’t know how many calories I was supposed to eat in a day. Instead, I just ate when I was hungry and didn’t eat when I wasn’t.

I wasn’t a fat kid—until we moved to America. There’s just a lot of shit in American food that isn’t good for you. For example, in England, I can drink as much milk as I want. In the US, I’m lactose intolerant. It wasn’t like my body started changing in weird and unexplained ways. It was simple: I just got fatter.

I started to get teased at school, and kids would call me “Smelly Kelly with the big fat belly,” but that was nothing compared to what people in the media said. Imagine waking up, getting the newspaper that’s been shoved through your letterbox, and opening it to a picture of you with a headline that reads “Ozzy Osbourne’s Beached Whale of a Daughter!” When you’re sixteen fucking years old! When it came to the media, I was bullied way more for being fat than I ever was for being a drug addict and going to rehab. After all—beautiful people go to rehab all the time, so it was almost culturally acceptable. Being fat was not.

My weight struggles continued into my early twenties, and my parents tried to help me, or at least make me feel better about myself. Mum would always give me some sort of encouragement about how I was different and beautiful in my own way. Dad was no less caring, though not exactly tactful like Mum.

One of my all-time favorite Dad-isms happened once when I was in my early twenties and in the middle of doing a medical detox at home. I was coming off a really heavy opiate habit, and coming off hard. Dad came in and sat on the edge of my bed. He’d been through his own share of detoxes, so he knew the hell I was going through. Bless his heart, he tried to make me feel better.

“Kel,” he said, “is this because you’re fat? If it is because you’re fat, I’ll pay for you to get a personal trainer if you want. I really love you, and I don’t want to see you like this.”

I was sweating and had the kicks, and my whole body was in pain. I just looked at him, and then rolled over and faced the wall. Part of me wanted to laugh, but the other part thought, I’m fucking dying here and you’re asking me if it’s because I’m fat?!? I do love you, Dad!

I hated working out, and when I couldn’t comfort myself with drugs, I turned to the next best thing: food. It was a potent combination, and I soon hit my heaviest point. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to lose weight; it was more that it just seemed overwhelming. I didn’t like the way I looked but didn’t know how to fix it. I need to lose fifty pounds—where the fuck do I start?! What was more, I didn’t even like myself enough to try.

All that changed when I went on Dancing with the Stars.

In London, I had auditioned for a role in Chicago. I’d poured my all into the audition, even going to a ballet store beforehand and buying a leotard and cutoff sweatshirt. I was still all chubby and even more butch than I am now, up there in a Flashdance rehearsal outfit. No one who I was auditioning for had ever heard me sing live before. I sang “Funny Honey,” and when I finished, the room was dead silent. Well, shit, I thought, I guess I’ve really fucked this one up.

Then, after a beat, everyone jumped up and started cheering. “You’ve got it!” one of the producers said. “You’re our new Roxie!” I nearly shat my leotard—I couldn’t believe they were giving me the lead!

They rushed me straight into rehearsals, and after an hour, the choreographer—who I dearly love to this day—addressed the elephant in the room. “Uh-uh, honey,” he said. “I can’t teach this one to dance.” Bob Fosse is all hips and jazz hands, and I just thrashed around like I was being electrocuted. I couldn’t even do a box step, and in Broadway productions, a box step is as basic as walking.

I ended up with the role of Mama Morton, and at twenty-two, I was the youngest person to ever play the role in the West End. Doing live theater ended up being one of the most thrilling and challenging experiences of my life.

I still knew I needed to learn how to fucking dance, though, so when the opportunity came up to do Dancing with the Stars, my chubby ass pulled the leotard out of the closet and went for it. It was the best thing I’ve ever done for my health.

I can honestly say that Louis van Amstel changed my life. He was one of the first people in my entire life, outside of my family, who was 100 percent there for me, and it wasn’t just about the show. He truly believed in me. That’s a feeling too few people in this world ever get to feel. It was fucking amazing. I have to give credit where credit is due, because without him, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I didn’t make it easy on him.

I showed up to my first day of rehearsal on an empty stomach. I hadn’t eaten anything beforehand because I wasn’t hungry, and so halfway through, I puked. Louis took one look at me bent over a trash can and sighed. “This is going to be a tougher job than I thought,” he said. “I see we have to start from the beginning and get the basics down before we even teach you how to dance.”

TRANSLATION

Petrol

Gasoline

The first thing he did was teach me to think of eating as putting petrol** in your car: Your car won’t run without fuel, and it also won’t run if you put the wrong kind of fuel in it. He taught me how to eat mostly lean protein and vegetables—as opposed to fat and carbs, which were what I usually ate—and to adjust how many calories I ate according to how much I practiced.

I had always hated working out, mainly because I hated sweating. I’ve worked out with my mum and her trainer before, and it’s so hard-core. I’ll look over and Mum’s barely broken a sweat, like she’s walked under a mister at most. Meanwhile, I’m dying and look like I’ve just been dunked in a pool. When Dad works out, he’s the same, so I know where my sweat gene comes from.

The sheer physical exercise of Dancing with the Stars wasn’t the hardest part of it, though. The hardest part was being forced to look at myself in the mirror all day long. Finally, a friend had enough of me. “I’m sick and tired of hearing you talk about yourself this way,” she said. She made me promise that I would stop; then she made me stand in front of the mirror and say “I am beautiful” ten times in a row while looking. I couldn’t do it to save my life.

“I’m . . . ugh . . . er . . . booo . . .” Finally, I stammered it out, and the more I said it, the easier it got. I even started to believe it. Kind of.

My friends know that if I make a promise, I will keep it, and so that’s what I did. Every morning, before I went to rehearsal, I would stand in front of the mirror and tell myself I was fucking beautiful. Sure, it felt silly, but it also worked. Instead of looking at my reflection as I normally did, just looking for things to hate and that I thought were ugly, I started to find things that I actually liked.

For instance, I noticed that I’ve got really, really long bottom eyelashes. Well, that’s kind of cool, I’d think. Not many people have that. I’d always really liked the color of my eyes, and I’m one of the few girls I know who’s never had a nose job. My jawline might make me look like Winston Churchill and his dog, but it’s all part of what makes me me.

None of these realizations were easy. As women, we’re told so often we should hate ourselves that finding something we like almost makes us feel guilty, but eventually, I got through it. For the first time in my life, instead of just wishing that everything was different, I started to work with what I had.

When I was on Dancing with the Stars, losing weight wasn’t my goal. Winning wasn’t my goal. My main goal was just to get better each week.

Ballroom dancing was different from anything I’d ever done before. I’m a power chick, which is frowned upon in my industry (it’s frowned upon in most industries), and ballroom dancing was all about letting the male be in charge. I’d never let anyone lead me before, in anything, but if I didn’t do it in this case, I’d be on my ass. At first, it was really, really hard to not be in control, but as my trust in Louis grew, the thing I feared actually became freeing. We were truly a team, and it was a huge weight off my shoulders to know that it wasn’t all on me, that I could let someone else take over without everything falling apart.

Being on the show taught me dedication, and it showed me that I could do anything I wanted if I put my mind to it. I never thought I’d do ballroom dancing! Much less be good at it! But I was, and when Louis and I came in third that season, I was so fucking proud. The audience had watched me through the entire show. They’d seen how I’d improved and how hard I’d worked—this was not a victory that people could write off by attributing it to the fact that I was Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter.

Over the course of the show, and our days of up to fourteen hours of rehearsal, I lost almost fifty pounds, which is a lot for someone my size. I started to notice it first in my chest. I could see my collarbones, then some of my ribs. When I first saw the beginnings of a six-pack, I threw my Spanx in the garbage. Good riddance, I thought. Whenever I gain weight, it goes to my boobs first, so much so that people have claimed over and over that I’ve had a boob job, but this time, I lost almost three cup sizes. No one commented specifically on my shrinking cleavage, but I learned that everyone is absolutely obsessed with weight loss.

The reactions that I got after I was on Dancing with the Stars were some of my main prompts for wanting to write this book. Everyone kept asking, “What’s your secret?!” as if I fucking had one!

You watched my transformation on TV! I thought. You told me you voted for me! It took months of nonstop dancing, and you’re acting like it happened overnight?! It blew my mind, but I was ignorant to how it looked to people from the outside. It was my life, so I watched every ounce sweat away, but other people were just picking up bits and pieces here and there—that I used to be fat, and now I was skinny. They didn’t realize how long it had taken me, but there is no fucking secret. I just worked my ass off, and had the stress fractures in my feet to prove it.

When it comes to weight loss, there is no quick fix. It’s not about dieting; it’s about diet. You have to overhaul your entire lifestyle. I believe that you should never deny yourself anything, because that’s how you end up eating a whole cake while you’re trying to limit yourself to forkfuls of lettuce dipped in fat-free dressing.

I used to do whatever I could to avoid working out, and now I get excited about feeling the burn. I love cardio and will mix in yoga and Pilates to keep myself from getting bored. Throughout my process of learning how to eat right and exercise, I was confronted time and time again with how many of the ideas I had about my body were just flat-out wrong. I’d always thought of myself as naturally chubby and someone who just couldn’t lose weight—it turned out I’m actually the opposite. My weight still fluctuates—mainly because my schedule is always changing, and sometimes I can’t take care of myself as well as I should—but when I am working out consistently, with or without a trainer, I drop weight really fast. I’ve had to learn to be careful, because now I like working out so much that I can do it too often, and before I know it, I’m too skinny.

I never thought that would be my problem, but when I look at pictures of myself at my brother’s wedding, I think, Eat something! I looked like Skeletor. My body doesn’t look good really skinny. It just doesn’t, and that’s another lesson I had to learn: It’s not about weight, or size, but being healthy. My proudest body moment was being on the cover of Cosmopolitan UK’s body issue, and they didn’t airbrush a thing except for the spots from where I’d gotten waxed the day before and it pulled my spray tan off. (In the UK, there is a law against air-brushing in certain situations, particularly having to do with beauty and aesthetics.) I didn’t look like Gisele, but I looked pretty fucking good, and what was more, I looked like me.

Everybody on this planet was put here for a reason, and everybody is uniquely different. Not everybody looks the same. I don’t understand this culture we are living in where everyone has the same eyebrows, the same ombré hair, the same bag, the same shoes . . . everybody wants to look the same. Why do you want to be a clone? Why not just be yourself and look like you?

I do think this is changing, but it’s mainstream culture leading the charge, and Hollywood is struggling to catch up. If you look at advertisements right now—like the Big Lots commercials or the Progressive ads that star Flo—you’ll see women who are beautiful in a real-woman-you-might-actually-know kind of way. They’re not stick-thin anorexics, they’re not perfect, and they’re not trying to be. People want people they can relate to, and they want to look at someone they can easily aspire to, not images that will always be unrealistic and out of reach.

The way most celebrities look is unattainable for most people. Even if someone is famous because they make albums or movies, when they’re not doing that, they have to spend all day in the gym with a personal trainer. They get up at four thirty every morning and never get to pick what they eat. Do you think they want to do that? No, they have to. It’s part of their job, and it’s expensive!

I refuse to fall into this trap that society has set for us. I won’t follow these rules and I won’t apologize for it, either. Everyone knows what I look like, and everyone has an idea about who they think I am. I’m not going to spend twelve hours a day in the gym trying to get people not to talk shit about me, because I’ve learned that they’re going to talk shit about me no matter what.

My career has never depended on whether I was fat or thin, or whether I’m attractive. I’ve never made money from my body or from being known as the pretty girl. I’ve made money because of my opinions, my personality, and hard work, and the longer I’m in this business, the more I realize how rare that is.

At the time of this writing, I am thirty-two, and I’m watching a lot of my friends in the industry go through this awful time with their careers (and sometimes their personal lives). When youth and beauty have been the cornerstones of your life, there’s always someone behind you who’s younger and prettier. It’s enough to cause a nervous breakdown, and I’ve witnessed dozens of them. I honestly feel for my friends, because it must be awful, but since I don’t understand it, I don’t know how to help them.

I think the world is cruel to women, no matter how attractive you are. For most of my life in the public eye, I never felt any pressure to be or act sexy, but all that changed when I lost weight. The first time I did a photo shoot in a minidress, rather than loving how I looked, I didn’t feel like me and I was super-uncomfortable. Each new look was shorter and shorter, and the photographer kept trying to coach me into “sexy” positions, like with my mouth open and thrusting out my cleavage. Eventually, I cried, doing my drag-queen cry where I bend over so that the tears fall directly onto the floor and don’t muss up my makeup—but still, not exactly the lusty vibe they were going for.

That was my biggest failing on Dancing with the Stars. Whenever a dance required me to act sexy and like I just couldn’t wait to tear that costume off Louis, I’d just freeze up and couldn’t do it. Being sexy in front of a crowd is not my thing. I’ve never aspired to be a sex object, and I used to be a real nerd about it, but now I just do not give a shit anymore. I don’t know how I got to the point where I am comfortable embodying my inner sexy for photo shoots or a role, but I am. Aside from that, I do not think I would ever have the confidence of Mae West, if you know what I am saying.

I was blond for a bit as an adult, and one of the main reasons I ditched the golden tresses was that I hated the way people automatically sexualized a skinny blond woman. It was like I’d gone from being a Cabbage Patch Kid to a Barbie. I’ll never forget running into a friend at the PETA awards, shortly after I’d gotten skinny. This was a man who’d known my father for years and had watched me grow up. I had on a dress with cutouts, and he was standing next to me and put his arm through one of the cutouts, so he was just standing there holding my naked waist. I made excuses and backed away as quickly as I could, feeling gross and thinking, Well, he just revealed himself as a pervert.

That was the first time this happened, but unfortunately it was not the last. At the time I was too surprised to know immediately what to do, but now I call people out on it, and say something: “Excuse me! I just watched you realize I’m not a kid anymore and sexualize me immediately! Do not do that!”

I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing I looked different, but now I realize that every woman, no matter how beautiful she is, still has to put up with a whole bunch of shit. One of the reasons I stopped covering the red carpet was because I could no longer stomach it, standing there with a smile on my face while watching successful actresses get grilled with the most asinine questions.

No one—no one—asks a man what he’s wearing to the Oscars, because it’s probably the same tux he wore to the last awards show. Instead, it’s serious questions about his films or other very important projects he’s working on. Meanwhile, every single woman gets asked about her dress and who made it—nothing about her achievements, what she’s working on, or any nominations that brought her to the show that night. I was constantly shocked by how stupid the questions were—I’ve seen people ask an actress what she did to get in shape for the big night, which is code for asking her how she lost weight—and from three feet away, I could see these women’s faces fall, how it was obvious that they weren’t happy but had to answer anyway to avoid seeming like a bitch.

How you look is important to your self-esteem—I wouldn’t have a career in fashion if I didn’t think that—but I think we as a society have to stop telling women that how you look is the most important thing. It’s toxic, and we’re raising a generation of girls who are incredibly harsh on themselves. When I was a teenager, I was definitely bullied some for being overweight, but for the most part, none of my classmates gave a fuck about how I looked.

I think that’s different today. While I was working on this letter, I was staying with my dear friend Kelly Cutrone in New York and had the chance to spend tons of time hanging out with her daughter, Ava, and some of Ava’s friends. They are total badass bitches, but they enlightened me to their world, and it ain’t pretty. They told me that because of social media, it’s all about looks. You can’t just look okay; you have to look perfect. They go to SoulCycle every day, they worry about wrinkles, they know girls who get boob jobs and nose jobs—and they’re fourteen fucking years old!

I am all for plastic surgery—as Joan said, “My nipples will never be introduced to my belly button”—but I think it should be illegal for children under age eighteen to get it unless it’s absolutely necessary. Plastic surgery can change people’s lives. I’ve seen friends turn into new people after a confidence boost from a nose job, or women cry because they were able to go for a jog for the first time in their adult lives after having a breast reduction. But these were adults. Everyone goes through an awkward phase, and your face and body change as you get older, but the way we live now, no one can stand to be imperfect even for a minute. All these young girls feel so much pressure to look a certain way that it’s created a toxic cycle of hate and criticism that you direct at yourself and other women.

I get Botox twice a year, and I started in my twenties. Producers, cameramen, and stylists were always asking why I looked so pissed off, even though I’d swear up and down that I wasn’t. Then it hit me: I had frown lines crosshatching my forehead from squinting into the bright lights to read the monitors, and it gave me raging resting bitch face.

That’s where Botox has helped me, but I always get sad when I see women who look like ventriloquist’s dummies because their chin is the only part of their face that moves. I completely believe that people can get addicted to plastic surgery, because suddenly feeling pretty is a thrill. But like anything that gives you a rush, it doesn’t last, and soon you need a lot to feel anything at all.

It’s a losing game, because if someone loves you for how you look, that’s not real love and it will fade no matter what you do. What’s inside you—your mind and soul, your sense of humor, and your intellect—is more important than what is on the outside. Superficial beauty fades, and no matter how much Botox or how many butt implants you get, no one is going to find the fountain of youth. Eventually we’re all going to look like California raisins with gray hair.

I finally became comfortable with how I look through therapy and just growing up. Once I wasn’t a teenager in my me-me-me phase anymore, I was able to really look at other people and see that our true beauty lies in our differences. I also saw that no one is immune to insecurities and occasionally feeling bad about themselves. Even supermodels—and I know quite a few personally—have good days and bad days. Sometimes those bad days can really take over. I still refer to myself as an FFP (Former Fat Person) because I still have that little devil on my shoulder calling me chubby, who wants me to see myself not as I am but as I was.

I don’t want to be the most gorgeous woman in the world (sounds boring), but I do want to be content with myself. Feeling good about yourself is also an ongoing process. You’re never going to be fixed, and you have to keep working on yourself. It’s like when you go on a diet, lose a whole bunch of weight, and then think you can eat whatever you want because you’re skinny now. Next thing you know—diet again! You have to make a full life change to eat right, exercise, and be kind to yourself, and you have to commit and stick to it.

It’s a lot harder to look in the mirror and say, “I’m beautiful,” than it is to pick out all your flaws, but hating yourself will get you nowhere. You have to learn to be confident and not listen to what other people say, because they’re just directing their own hate at you, and most of what they say is stupid anyway. If you want to change your life, change it, but remember that the only thing you really have to be is you.

Love,

Kelly O