Nigella Lawson: Too much of a good thing?

Reuters

CURVEY GODDESS OR DUMPY FRUMP? Showing off her curves, domestic goddess Nigella Lawson proves you don't have to be stick thin to survive on TV these days.

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Not since Marilyn Monroe has a woman profited from her curves with such impunity and flair as has Nigella Lawson.

That the British celebrity chef has been able to do so in an age dominated by media images of brittle, hard-faced, emaciated, salad-picking killjoys is all the more worthy of admiration.

The near-hysteria with which some worship Lawson's carnality is a sign of just how starved contemporary culture is of rotund, sensual role models of women, in short, who embody the pleasures of the flesh.

Lawson famously put the raunch back into aprons, and the salacious back into spoon-licking, but it's a fine line between appetisingly curvaceous domestic goddess and, let's not mince words here, fat frump. And Lawson, as anyone addicted to her cooking shows would have noted, has been creeping towards the less glamorous side of the scale, becoming more corpulent than carnal.

In response, la Lawson has "secretly" begun seeing a personal trainer – a secret Britain's Daily Mail broadcast to the world. The revelation was greeted by the requisite online discussions, with comments ranging from those chastising Lawson's fattening, high-kilojoule recipes, to those cautioning against adopting a Posh approach to life.

"I hope she doesn't turn into a size zero waif," wrote a certain Mise, from Limerick, Ireland. "Nigella's curves are what make her." Another hoped she wouldn't become "old and haggard" like husband Charles Saatchi, who turned vegetarian, swore off his wife's food and lost 25 kilograms in the process.

Lawson, who never trained as a cook, has said that her only qualification is "as an eater": "I cook what I want to eat, within limits."

She appears to have transgressed those limits. It's easy to do, says Melbourne personal trainer Zeno Tzatzaris, who places himself firmly in the fans of Lawson's curves camp. "She has obviously started to stack some weight on. You can put a kilo on a year, which does not sound like much, but over 10 years that's a lot."

Weight gain is a simple equation of energy-in (food) versus energy-out (exercise), he says. To lose weight one either needs to eat less, or exercise more, and for someone such as Lawson, whose work is food, expending more energy is probably the surer way to weight loss so hiring a personal trainer is a good step.

Not that we want Lawson to go all Madonna on us. In their Body Shape Bible, British style queens Trinny and Susannah classify Lawson as the classic hour-glass – not any old hour-glass, mind, but the pinnacle, the epitome, the divinity of hour-glassness. "Nigella is an inspiration to all hour glasses," they write, slavering over her "voluptuous hips", her "tiny waist", her "Rubenesque shoulders".

Part of the salivating, surely, is that when one looks at Lawson one immediately sees flashes of all those glorious things that she's been cooking and eating: slut-red raspberries in chardonnay jelly (served with double cream), deep fried chocolate bars, ham in Coca Cola, quadruple chocolate cake "named not for the bypass you may feel you need after eating it, but in honour of the four choc factors that comprise its glory", Lawson explains.

Even weight-management expert Dr Rick Kausman, author of Calm Eating and If Not Dieting, Then What?, rates Lawson as a "good role model": her philosophy about enjoying food is important at a time when people have developed warped relationships with food. Extreme approaches such as fad diets or attempting to cut out all treats lead to anxiety and guilt.

"It's not wrong to enjoy food, we want to encourage that, but many of us are doing a lot of non-hungry eating," he says, offering this motto to the weight- challenged: "I can have it, but do I really feel like it?"

So Lawson, with personal trainer in tow, might just be able to have her slut- red raspberries in chardonnay jelly (served with double cream) and smother herself in them too.

* Nigella Feasts starts on TV One this Saturday at 5.30pm.