Let's All Argue About Ed Sheeran's Weight Problem

Ed Sheeran has lost a lot of weight recently. Is that justified because he was/is massively fat, or was he just overreacting? Don't the public love a porker, anyway? I guess there's only way to find out: Invent two journalists and get them to argue about it.

ED SHEERAN IS TOO THIN
by Barry Shitpeace-Thackeray

Ed Sheeran is the popstar we all love to love. He seems to have it all. A fantastic, chart-smashing album with an interestingly kooky title. A cheeky-chappy line in wry observation. A brace of BRIT Award nominations. A loving family. A well-pressed wardrobe of hooded tops.

Yet recent shots of Ed suggest that all is not well in the land of Sheeran. His emaciated figure now grins at us from a series of new press pictures. What does that grin remind you of? That's right. A skull. A dead Ed. In a coffin. After being killed by his eating disorder. Yup. Correct. True. Uh-huh.

Ed Sheeran has lost a reputed 20kg in the past few months. How long will it be before we find plastic bags filled with his furtively stashed vomit above the ceiling tiles in his Surrey home? How long before Ed's manager and booking agent knock on the dressing room door and find their only source of income slumped on the toilet, trying to shit out the pieces of wet paper he ate earlier to stop his stomach from cramping?

With his formerly big and jolly frame, Ed ought to have been a role model to body-positive plus-sized popstars everywhere. He was a cheery doughboy who visibly said: “BLT please mate – easy on the lettuce and tomato.” He held out a glimmer of hope to the 36 waists. Yet now he too has been seduced by the mythology of size-zero. He has fallen under the Medusa spell of airbrushed celebrity magazines. Ed, I've got news for you: Jennifer Aniston's thighs are not real and Lana Del Rey only looks that way in real life if you fold her down the middle. Sophie Dahl – now there's a celebrity we can all believe in. But Holly Vallance? Holly-Gram, more like. 

Of course, the greatest irony is perhaps that Ed was meant to be the popstar who brought us 'reality'. He was supposed to be the guy who reflected life as it is lived by all of us: be it with his classic depiction of the real life of crack prostitutes in "The A Team", or the simple joys of building a Lego™ house in "Lego House". Now, he has succumbed to the unreality of the food-toxic body-dysmorphic society in which we live. In which a young man can't eat a roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings without being made to feel that he has no worth to society. In which a lad with a perfectly healthy appetite for Walnut Whips can't have that sated by eating three in one sitting without being told he should eat fewer Walnut Whips. Now, sadly, Ed is starting to take on Dorian Gray-like shades of a character he has written about:

But lately her face seems
Slowly sinking, wasting
Crumbling like pastries
And they scream
The worst things in life come free to us
Cos we're just under the upperhand
Go mad for a couple of grams
And she don't want to go outside tonight
And in a pipe she flies to the Motherland
Or sells love to another man

Recognise that, Ed? The comfortably roly-poly Sheeran we once knew is now selling his 'love' to another man: the thin man he has become. Don't do it, Old Ed. Don't sell your soul to New Ed. Don't become the Karen Carpenter of cheeky ska-pop. We need you too much. We've only just begun, and six months after Amy, we can't afford to lose another hero.

Are you pro thin-Ed? Go to page two to read Ed argue the case for himself.