Don’t dare SKINNY SHAME women like me and SJP – we can’t help being effortlessly SLIM!

Just as women are attracted to men with a certain body type, Anya knows that she won’t be to every man’s taste. As a single mother, she recently had what she describes as a terrible experience with a chef she met on a dating app.

‘On our second date he took me to a restaurant and as chef he took orders. When I lay down, he said he was relieved because he thought I was the type who didn’t want to eat anything and was probably anorexic. He was relieved, but I was furious.”

Being thin and coming of age in the late 1960s was a golden age for girls like me. But even though he was slim enough by normal standards, there was always one step further to go. So I tried the fad diets of the day, from the grapefruit diet to the Atkins and Scarsdale diets, and at one particularly naive point I started drinking noxious teas as purgatives. I had started working for Cosmopolitan magazine and my behavior was pretty much the norm.

Linda Kelsey suspects that SJP, like many skinny beans, is reconsidering the joys of being super thin

Every month we published a column called Dieter’s Notebook. No one questioned that models should be anything other than skinny, and it continued in much the same way for decades.

Even when we promoted Susie Orbach’s Fat Is A Feminist issue in 1978 and left out the diet features, we continued to believe that skinny, albeit with breasts, was the best when it came to models. And even as we started promoting the 1980s fitness craze and Jane Fonda-style workouts, thin was still the gold standard.

I’m a little ashamed that I subscribed to the skinny aesthetic and barely questioned it until the body positive movement really took shape in the early 2000s.

But while I believe the movement has gone too far, as obesity is rarely recognized as a major health threat, it is now universally accepted that women of different shapes and sizes are not only worthy of being seen and celebrated, but also to be beautiful.

What is unacceptable is that thin people are now victims of a skinny-shaming that is a free-for-all. If we are thin, we must be bulimic, anorexic, body dysmorphic, or mentally unhinged. While it actually all happens automatically.

In fact, it seems that skinny models are discriminated against in some circles. A young, successful model recently told me that she hardly gets any work in the UK because everyone wants a different body type than her natural one. So she goes to Paris, where skinny still rules.

One thing I didn’t expect was that the issue of being thin would become more of a problem than a problem as I got older. At 72, while I can still fit into the same size jeans as I did when I was 22, my thinness means my wrinkles are much more noticeable than my fuller-faced friends. My bum has almost disappeared and I’m thinking of trying M&S’s recently launched bum fillets.

We now know that thinning as we age is not good for our bones because it increases the risk of bone fractures. Even Anya was shocked when she was turned away from donating blood because she weighed too little and it could put too much strain on her heart.

Replacing fat-shaming with skinny-shaming is neither justice nor deserved retribution

And while I rather suspect that SJP was more enthralled with her thinness in her Sex And The City days than she lets on, like many skinny beans, at 59 she is reconsidering the joys of being super thin.

Replacing fat-shaming with skinny-shaming is neither justice nor deserved retribution. It is a failure to recognize that, like being tall, being naturally thin is just part of being human.