So, the other day I went to meet my best friend for a chilled glass of white wine and a weight-related smackdown. She’d just had a baby; I’d just had a personality transplant to become one of the reporters for New magazine. In other words, there was a lot to celebrate.

As we clinked our glasses together under the unseasonably warm London sun, I couldn’t help but wonder: was she wearing Spanx? She’d walked in to the bar a few minutes after me, and I’d noticed from my table in the corner that she was – and there’s no other word for it – flaunting her figure in a tight-fitting blue dress. To be honest, I was a little bit sick in my mouth when I saw it. She’d given birth five weeks ago and I didn’t even know they let women out so soon after pushing humans out through their naughty parts/vajazzle-holes. But here she was, flaunting away. I was kind of impressed, gals, but obvs also kind of grossed out.

How to address the literal elephant in the room? In the end, I just came out and said it, because I’m a boundary-pusher like that.

‘You wearing Spanx, Kerry?’

She looked uncomfortable for a second, then nodded. ‘Thing is, I can’t really flaunt my figure like this five weeks after giving birth without a pair of Spanx, despite the diet,’ she intimated, leaning slightly revoltingly over her glass like the postnatal pig that she is. ‘I think later on, I might change into a pair of jeans.’

I mean, ew. Discomfort? Dieting? Fucking DENIM? I had to turn away and pretend I was having a coughing fit while I discreetly vomited into the nearest pot plant. The sick was staying safely ensconced in my mouth no more. And then I went home and wrote about it.

And scene.

This is the story I imagine is behind the scenes of ‘KERRY: I’M STILL NOT HAPPY WITH MY BODY!’, one of very many, many, many weight-related tales in the latest issue of New. The Spanx thing – and the way Kerry Katona let us all down by changing into jeans after going out – was courtesy of an ‘insider’. Which either means the writer made it up entirely, or there is actually a person who counts themselves as ‘insider of Kerry Katona’s Spanx’. Have they even stopped for one second to realise what that means?

It’s totally fine, though, because there’s a sentence at the end of the piece that mentions how she and her baby both almost died in childbirth so – and I quote directly – ‘Sod the scales, Kez, we’re just glad you’re OK!’ If the editorial board of a low-budget celebrity magazine ever addresses me with a nickname ending in ‘Z’ in a sentence that basically says ‘You’re a chubby slag, but hell, you’re alive!’ (not much chance of it, but you never know), then please take the Woman Eliminator to my head and end my suffering. And by Woman Eliminator I mean that new documentary on McBusted.

But listen, I know what you’re thinking. One little bitchy article on Kerry Katona’s weight doth not a fat-shaming magazine make – those Katona-haters are ten a penny, after all! So to make sure you don’t think I’m one of those Totally Oversensitive Women who moan on about really inconsequential things like media manipulation and photoshopping and plastic surgery rates and the pay gap or whatever, I’ve pulled up a few more juicy examples from the same rag to convince you, you cheeky little sod.

First up, it’s CELEB YO-YO BATTLES, which sounds like some kind of really cool nineties night out until you realise that they’re referring to diet. I’ll summarise this one quickly for you – Nicole Richie is too thin, Kelly Osbourne is about to become too fat, Natalie Cassidy is too fat, Jen Metcalfe is too fat, Charlotte Church thinks she’s a ‘happy medium’ but is actually too fat, and Mischa Barton is – you guessed it – too fat. Sick bitches.

Moving on, it’s ‘The five things that could ruin Kim Kardashian’s wedding’, as gleefully imagined by New. Number four is that she could be ‘unhappy with her bridal bod’. When I imagine my own wedding, it usually involves one of my relatives punching the other over a plate of deflated homemade sandwiches while I weep softly in the corner, clutching resolutely on to the man I hired as my fake husband to make my mother happy and totally ruining the latest H&M ‘statement dress’ a sixteen year old shopping assistant talked me into a couple of days earlier. And what I mean by this is: there are literally a thousand things Kim could worry about over and above her ‘bridal bod’. Baby North could shit on the cake. Kanye could perform a spontaneous tune about the size of her famous arse in front of her mother, sorry, ‘momager’. Solange Knowles could turn up and beat the hell out of someone. CREATIVITY, New magazine. You could have made this a readable feature. But ‘bridal bod’? I’m not buying, coz you’re not really selling.

Anyway, a couple pages later it’s Tamara Ecclestone: ‘Don’t hate me for getting my figure back.’ Background story: she gave birth seven weeks ago, and now she’s wearing a bikini. Some woman tweeted about the bikini photoshoot saying: ‘Looks like she never even had a baby – let alone a baby 7 weeks ago!’ God, why are women such cunts?

Next, it’s Gemma Merna (no, I don’t know who she is either but let’s carry on regardless.) ‘I’D LOVE TO LOOK LIKE KIM KARDASHIAN’ is the headline, which implies she definitely hasn’t heard that Kim’s wedding could be ruined by the mere thought of her bridal bod. This is an ‘exclusive interview’ as part of Now’s ‘Keeping It Real’ campaign, which pledges to run some celebrity interviews without airbrushed photos. Now, I’m not trying to hate on a potentially good thing here, but when the whole interview is conducted under the gigantic words ‘Gemma goes unairbrushed and talks about her lack of body confidence’, I’m not exactly feeling the love. A couple of paragraphs describe how she ‘understandably looks nervous’ about being photographed sans airbrush, which they twice refer to as ‘daunting’. And then come the questions (all verbatim): ‘Are you confident with how you look?’, ‘Is there an area of your body you have a particular hang-up about?’, ‘What size are you?’, ‘Has being on TV made you more body conscious?’, ‘How do you stay in shape?’, ‘Do you have a good diet?’, ‘Do you compare your body to the other Hollyoaks girls’ bodies?’, ‘Are you confident not wearing make-up?’, ‘How much weight did you lose when filming Splash?’, ‘People have said Danielle O’Hara is too skinny. What do you think?’, ‘Why did you have a boob job at 21?’, ‘Would you have more surgery?’, ‘Have you had Botox?’, and my personal favourite, ‘Does [husband] Ian prefer you looking natural?’

And it’s not over yet. The next interview, with Michelle Heaton, runs under ‘IT’S EASY TO GET HUNG UP ABOUT WEIGHT’ (you don’t fucking say), which asks ‘You said you don’t feel 100 per cent body confident – why?’ (the depressing answer: ‘I think that’s the case for most women. We’ve all got something we’d like to change… I’m not totally body confident, but show me a girl who is!’), ‘Have you found it harder to lose your baby weight this time round?’, ‘What are you eating?’ and ‘Which celeb body do you admire?’

Then there’s Geordie Shore’s Holly Hagan with ‘MY DIET SECRETS’ (‘Is it true you tried the corset diet recently?’, ‘Does your weight still go up and down?’, ‘Are you body confident?’) and another interview with Lisa Snowdon titled ‘I NEED TO GET WORKING OUT’ (‘Do you still feel a pressure to look slim?’, ‘Which celeb body do you envy?’, ‘Do you cut anything out of your diet?’) And that’s without even bothering to cast my eye over ‘Lauren’s Diet Diaries’, the only one of the bunch that’s actually supposed to be about weight.

To top it all off, there’s one slightly entertaining feature called ‘What your body says about you’, which is like that piece we all enjoyed in some backwater mag called ‘Bum-ology’ last week, but with more body parts. My favourite part is where they say that women with prominent chins, ‘like Caroline Flack’, are more sexually active but less likely to be chosen by silverback males as long-term partners. Probably because their vaginas are as wide as their jawlines, the sluts.

There is a wider point here about how an innocent, fairly trashy sitting-in-the-sun read can turn you into the sort of insecurity-laden wreck who quivers more than the bedposts of your biggest-chinned friends, but I’m not gonna get on my high horse. You can work this shit out. After all, I have a lifetime supply of lipo to save up for – not to mention a chinplant to Google.