I can’t figure out if Amy Winehouse is spinning even more out of control, or maybe getting her act together. I am cautiously optimistic that it might actually be the latter. She abandoned Blake Fielder-Civil, her loser jailbird husband, to go on vacation with her ex-boyfriend. Normally that’d be a sign of a really bad wife, but in Amy’s case, it was a sign that maybe she was breaking away from the codependent drug addict. Then she was seen out and about with her father, who has long been considered her best support in her fight against substance abuse. And now she’s dyed her hair blonde. Okay it does look really, really bad. But it might be an indication that Amy’s trying to change her outward appearance to signify a change inward. Or I could be reading way too much into it. But it seems like her behavior was predictably self-destructive for quite awhile, and you could generally assume that on any given night she was getting high, getting in a fight with Blake, and then running through the streets of London with bloody shoes. She was never seen with any other guys or doing much of anything else.

Amy recently gave an interview to OK! Magazine. She says some rather unflattering things about herself, but to me it seems that she’s being realistic and honest about her issues. Hopefully getting past the denial means she’ll move on to some form of recovery, although it seems pretty clear she’s not ready for that yet.

“Drinking long-term is a lot worse than doing heroin. Alcohol’s a real poison.”

And despite her terrible problems with drug and alcohol abuse, when it comes to rehab she still says no. A newly bleached Amy said: “I’m of the school of thought where if you can’t sort something out for yourself then no one can help you,” she told a U.S. magazine. “I don’t know whether that’s because I’m a strong woman. If I go to the gym and I have a drink, I’m lovely to be around and really sweet. But if I haven’t been training or if there’s something bothering me, I’m a terrible drunk.”

Asked if her drinking gets her in trouble, she recalled: “I went to a restaurant recently and my friend was like, ‘Do you remember the last time we were here? The head waiter carried you but you were trying to punch and kick us’.

[From the Daily Mail]

Amy also says people shouldn’t worry about her weight, and she’s not actually as thin as she appears in photos. She said magazines retouch them to make her legs look skinnier, and they do the same thing to Victoria Beckham. I’ve rarely heard celebrities complain that magazines go out of their way to make them look thinner. Fatter, yes. But I guess without seeing them both in person, it’s hard to say if mags do or don’t do that.

Amy insists she is not “bothered” by the attention given to her drastic weight loss. “I’ve lost the weight because I don’t smoke weed anymore,” she said “I go to the gym, I drink a lot of water and I eat right.” She also insisted that part of the problem for her – and others like Posh Spice – is media manipulation of photographs.

“I feel bad for Victoria Beckham because I see pictures of her and they’ve made her thighs look smaller,” Amy said. “They’ve done that to me, and it’s horrible. I’ve always had skinny little bird legs, but they’ve made them smaller.”

Asked if she had a problem with food she would only say “not really”. She added: “I’m fussy, though. I’ll eat West Indian, KFC, tuna salad, chicken soup – that’s about all I eat.”

[From the Daily Mail]

That doesn’t exactly sound like the most balanced diet. Though when I was in the UK for six weeks, I don’t think I ever saw a piece of fresh fruit or a vegetable on a menu, unless it was a baked potato. So I’m not really surprised to hear about the lack of fruits and veggies. It sounds like she has a very protein-filled diet. Though frankly her food choices aren’t exactly my biggest worry. Laying off the alcohol and drugs would be a great first step. It seems like there’s a chance Amy may leave Blake. The Daily Mail hints that she hasn’t gone to prison to visit her husband in a while. Combined with the other changes in her life, maybe she’s at the very beginning of a turnaround.

Picture note by Jaybird: Here’s Amy today at a Sainsburys grocery story in South London. Splash reports that she “took some time out to stop and pick up her goddaughter from school before going shopping.” Images thanks to Splash Photos.