Stars clean up their act with vegan obsession

BOY George lists his breakfast. Almond milk, chia seeds, coconut nectar, buckwheat, brazil nuts. Not a bowl of Frosties in sight, or a bacon and egg fry up with a mug of three sugars tea and a mound of white bread.

And most definitely not a line of white powder, or a treble vodka. He posts photos of lunch — cucumber sushi, radish, broccoli, tempeh — and snacks that are raw, green and organic. Like “vegan potato salad with fresh basil, engivitta yeast flakes and gay farmer olive oil.” It sounds unspeakably filthy, yet couldn’t be cleaner.

See photos of Boy George lately, aged fifty-something, and he is unrecognisable from the bloated figure snapped street sweeping in New York. Shiny, sparkly eyed and fresh faced, the bloat gone, the puffiness dissipated. He looks in rude health. He tweets his greens. He is a raw foodie, a reborn champion of the vegan, the macrobiotic, the wholefood.

Marc Almond, whose autobiography Tainted Life, details some of the most epic consumption in the history of drugs, is today keen on “clarity”, and is also vegan. For all the dead bodies in the music and film world, there are dozens more who have seen the light when it comes to what they put in their digestive systems. Not people like Gwyneth Paltrow, who was probably weaned on kale, but those who made a radical change from drugs and alcohol to tofu and blueberries. And are now obsessed with good health, finally treating their bodies like temples instead of superannuated amusement parks.

Ordinary recovering addicts and drunks do it too. We go bananas. We go nuts. Literally. We go spirulina-tastic. All those years of booze, powder, pills, painkillers, whatever we used, supplemented with sugar, caffeine and crap food, and then we stop, so that we don’t die too early. But what do we replace it all with? One friend, an ex coke head, took up sky diving — saying he needed a rush from somewhere—– and was so good he ended up teaching it. Another, an ex-heroin addict, got into weight lifting. At 5’2”, she could now deadlift a small truck, and has started entering and winning competitions. She has converted her body into solid muscle, through sheer obsession. And sips of protein shake every two hours.

Obsession, when it is connected with health, is wonderful. This is not about hypochondria, which is torture for everyone, but about getting into something with total abandon. Ex-addicts will talk for hours about nutrition, running, yoga, cycling, but only after their primary addiction has been stopped, replaced with cake and crisps, which has then flared into an addiction all of its own. The flight path from drink and drugs to carby sugary food to clean wholefood is deafening. And getting louder.