A star’s body of evidence

Published on Monday 26 August 2002 01:00

HER intentions were certainly honourable, but when Jamie Lee Curtis stripped to her black bra and Bridget Jones-style big black pants to reveal her physique in all its lumpy, bumpy and slightly wobbly glory, she unwittingly handed us all yet another major body phobia.

The Hollywood actress simply wanted to peel away the mythology surrounding the beautiful people by revealing that they too look pretty damn ropey without the aid of a plastic surgeon or decent flesh-coloured foundation garment beneath their designer togs.

Posing bare-faced and slouching towards the camera for an American magazine, the grinning 43-year-old, whose perfect physique once helped provoke a worldwide stampede to the gym, proceeded to publicly dissect her now slightly less than superslim figure.

"I don’t have great thighs," she declared. But a quick glance at the accompanying photograph confirmed that, while they certainly aren’t as great as they once were, they are still substantially better than some - Judy Finnegan, Cherie Blair and most normal women lungeing torwards middle age, for example. "I have very big breasts and a soft, fatty little tummy," she continued.

And then she uttered six little words that left a nation spluttering into their Special K and skimmed milk: "And," she admitted, "I’ve got a fat back."

Suddenly, nearly every woman bigger than a size 8 - which is just about the entire female population over the age of 16 - and almost every man whose 28ins waist jeans are a distant memory, realised that however lousy they might look from the front, they probably look twice as dreadful from the rear.

And until now, they probably didn’t even realise it.

For while we spend an eternity preening and pouting in front of the mirror before we dare leave the house, sucking in bulging tummies, tweaking individual strands of hair and giving that spot one last squeeze, how many of us actually bother to check how we might look from the back?

And although we are all - demented men especially - only too aware of women’s daily mantra of "does my bum look big in this?", how many pause to ponder how the six rolls of blubber caused by a 34ins bra stretched to snapping point around a 38ins torso, actually look?

But now, thanks largely to Jamie (and those shop changing rooms with carefully positioned mirrors intended to give a helpful rear view), our blissful ignorance has been totally shattered.

Now we’ve got something other than our flabby tummies, expanding bums, lumpy cellulite, chunky love handles, droopy boobs - and that’s men as well as women - fat calves and double chins to worry about.

For now we’ve got back fat, too. Great chunks of it, no doubt, bulging out all over in places we can’t even reach to see.

Gavin Routledge at Active Osteopaths in West Port says it’s perfectly normal for us all to have a layer of subcutaneous flat over most of the body surface - only the palms of the hands and soles of the feet manage to remain largely fat-free.

"If you increase the body’s percentage of fat, it will be stored all over the place," he adds. "In women, it tends to be around the hips, and in men it’s around the belly. Some people will gather extra fat around the backs of their arms, and some people have more fat on their backs."

Where fat ends up is largely determined by your genetics but, adds Gavin, if you’re conscious of carrying a little more weight than you should, chances are some of it is hanging off your back.

So does back fat put you in danger of harming your back? "If you are carrying sufficient fat to store it on your back, then you will have a bit on the front too. And that is much more likely to put more pressure on your back," Gavin adds.

By now, no doubt, you will want to know how to get rid of it. But there’s more bad news.

Richard Last, head personal trainer at Esporta fitness centre, Fountainpark, piles on the misery. "Unfortunately, fat does get harder to shift, the older you get. As you age, your metabolism slows, which means you have to work harder to get into shape.

"And you can’t spot reduce fat from your back - no more than you can anywhere else on your body. But a good programme of aerobic exercise and diet will lose weight, and then people can concentrate on toning particular areas of muscle."

That means somehow prising yourself from the armchair and doing lots of lateral pulldowns at the gym, single arm dumb-bell raises and a lengthy stint on the rowing machine. But, warns Richard, simply concentrating on one area of your physique is not really a solution. "When people concentrate on toning a specific area, they are in danger of forgetting about everything else. It’s really got to be a whole body workout."

Alternatively, we could all just do a Jamie, and learn to love our bumps and bulges. Yet even she admits sometimes she likes a little help towards looking her best - and it’s one which few mere mortals could afford.

"I’m going to look the way God intends me to look . . . with a little help from Manolo Blahnik," she declares.

Somehow looking the way God intends, lumps and all, while wearing a pair of 24.99 high street specials might not have quite the same effect.