Kelly Clarkson, without wanting to be rude, has always erred on the side of chunky. She’ll never be a stick insect.

And that’s fine. It means she’s a real woman. Admittedly all women are real women provided that they’ve got the proper chromosomes, so it’s more accurate to say that Kelly Clarkson is a real woman who looks like she eats quite a lot. But that’s not the point. Kelly Clarkson is happy with how she looks, and she told Self magazine so recently.

However, Self magazine disagreed – so it airbrushed the living crap out of her on the cover. Inspiring.

There are two brilliant things about Kelly Clarkson. The first is how fiercely forthright she is about everything. It doesn’t matter what – the internet or American Idol or how much she hates children – Kelly Clarkson is always completely prepared to speak her mind, regardless of who she might offend. And she’s even happy to apply this same plain speaking to herself. There may be an unhealthy media interest in Kelly Clarkson’s weight, but Kelly doesn’t care. From the cover of  fitness, health and nutrition magazine Self this month, Kelly Clarkson said:

“When people talk about my weight, I’m like, ‘You seem to have a problem with it; I don’t. I’m fine!’ I’m never trying to lose weight – or gain it. I’m just being!”

And that’s the second brilliant thing about Kelly Clarkson – if you were stranded on a raft out at sea with her, you’d definitely kill and eat her first. Because there’d just be so much meat to go around.

That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Self magazine seems to think so, anyway, because it airbrushed about a third of Kelly Clarkson’s body off for the cover, leaving her looking like a perplexingly happy Debra Messing bobblehead. And fair enough – after all, Kelly Clarkson was appearing on the cover of the Total Body Confidence issue, not the Great Big Dumpy Wobbly Old Lardarse issue. The cover reads ‘Slim Down YOUR Way’, not ‘How To End Up Looking Like Bernard Manning’s Diabetes-Ridden Part-Whale Auntie’, doesn’t it?

And anyway, Self magazine was doing Kelly Clarkson a favour by drastically retouching her body on the cover of a magazine about feeling good about how you look. Just ask Self magazine editor-in-chief Lucy Danziger, who wrote a blog defending the publication’s actions:

“Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best…But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand.”

You see? All of that makes perfect sense. Self may have physically retouched the photos of Kelly Clarkson in an attempt to stop its readers from stabbing themselves in the eyes because the sight of a marginally overweight woman would clearly be too much for them to bear, but in the sense that Kelly Clarkson sort of looks quite happy in the photo then they definitely didn’t retouch anything and everyone should just shut up. We get it, Lucy. You’re our new hero.

But what does Kelly Clarkson think about being so brutally airbrushed on the cover of the Total Body Confidence issue of Self magazine? We’re afraid that you’ll just have to wait for her exclusive interview next month in the I’m So Disgusting And Nobody Will Ever Love Me issue of Hastily-Developed Eating Disorder Quarterly.

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