Skinny is as skinny does

Apparently, Nicole Richie's diet of greasy burgers and fries isn't cutting it. She's still losing weight. Her doctors have ruled out eating disorders and think it's stress related. I almost started to make the usual M&C conclusion that Nicole tops off her burgers with a little smackty-smack and washes those fries down with cosmos, but strangely, I can relate to Nicole's story.

I've always been underweight. Not so much now thanks to old age and a more sedate lifestyle along with the discovery of Soho Cupcakes, but throughout grade school, high school and college I was drastically underweight. We're talking concave abdomen, twig arms with incredibly sharp elbows and pretty much no curves to speak of. But I ate like a pig. Constantly snacking. I couldn't gain weight if my life depended on it. I even drank those protein shakes in addition to three full meals a day. Nothing worked...thanks to my tapeworm.

As a kid from rural Pennsylvania, it may seem odd that I would have one. I didn't have hordes of paparazzi following me or movie offers or modeling contracts, so there really wasn't a reason to maintain my skeletal frame. All the cool kids were robust girls with heaving bosoms and luscious asses, so being skinny was so not cool. I'm not even sure how I got the tapeworm, only that it prevented me from giving blood every year to the National Honor Society's blood drive (the irony being that I ran the event one year did not go by un-noticed).

I did tell someone about my tapeworm long after it got flushed out and I had graduated from college and finally hit the triple digit weight zone (thank you, grad school and pumpkin squares! Oh, and corn fries!) So maybe word spread...

You know what this means, don't you? Nicole has a tapeworm. No drugs or alcohol or binge and purging for her! You heard it here first, folks. A Mean and Catty exclusive. Nicole Richie can't gain weight and it's all because she can't get rid of her damn tapeworm.

Believe it or not.