FORMER MasterChef winner Julie Goodwin said she is in robust good health and has hit out at claims she needs to lose weight after posing in her swimming costume for a woman's magazine.
The mother of three said using size as the only indicator to someones health is facile after Sunday Telegraph Insider social columnist Ros Reines attacked her looks after appearing on the cover of New Idea.

Reines said it was irresponsible for Goodwin to pretend it is fine to be overweight and said she needs owes it to her children to downsize.

Goodwin hit back in her online blog yesterday saying she was proud of her body with all its magnificent imperfections.

The odd result of this movement to reject stigma, however, has been the introduction of stigma of another kind. "Judgmental" people find themselves condemned with a vehemence that would have gone down well in Salem. Those who live by the old morality end up paraded with abusive labels: if you deplore illegitimacy and the welfare dependency that often follows it, you show yourself to be "mean-spirited" and lacking in "compassion"; if you oppose the normalization of homosexuality, you are "homophobic"; if you believe in Western culture, you are an "elitist"—all labels that can damage a professional career. Stigma floats free in the anarchic world of individualist life-styles, ready to attach itself to anyone who stands up for self-restraint.

It is in this context that we should understand political correctness. The new kind of stigma creates a new kind of fear. Political correctness is not a morality in the traditional sense: it does not require you to change your life, to make sacrifices, or to live by an exacting code of conduct. It tells you to watch your language, so as to avoid the only prevalent adverse judgment, which is judgment of the adverse judge. It tells you to speak inclusively of other cultures, other life-styles, other values: never take a disapproving stance or use words that might imply one. Hence the extreme volatility of the new speech codes. Any phrase or idiom that seems to imply judgment of another category or class of people can become, almost overnight, an object of stigma.

Unlike the old forms of stigma, however, whose function was to bind a community together and to seal each member into the common fate, this new form of stigma has precisely the opposite aim: to permit social fragmentation. The talk of "social inclusion" is a mask for the reverse.

To stigmatise is the greatest stigma there is.

oh, and people saying that obesity is caused by poverty, but that only happens whenever the correlation between obesity and poverty is broached. personally i think the prevailing nutritional dogmas (carbohydrates overemphasised as good, for you 'low fat' obession etc) needs to be heavily scrutinised if we want to get anywhere with the obesity issue.

sugar-free foods play a role in the nation's current obesity epidemic.Twenty years ago, Dr. Russell Blaylock predicted that excess phenylalanine in the brain from using aspartame blocks the normal production of serotonin to the point of weight gain due to an increase craving for carbohydrates and sugar. The result: epidemic weight gain.