Isn’t Kate Winslet a tonic? Honest, smart and — gasp — happy, she’s an A-list celebrity who just won’t play the celebrity game and what a breath of fresh air she regularly blows up the tight-asses who populate her universe.

As an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Winslet is slap-bang in the centre spotlight of a world fixated on the tiny perfect bodies of its idolised female celebrities. The business encourages — often forces — those women to organise their lives around diet, exercise and cosmetic improvement while simultaneously lying about their easy, casual attitudes to food and their ‘lucky genes’.

But Winslet must drive the PRs, the stylists and the fashionistas crazy because she just won’t collude. This week she won £25,000 in damages from the Daily Mail for disputing her claim that she never goes to the gym. “I strongly believe that women should be encouraged to accept themselves as they are,” she said. “So to suggest that I was lying was an unacceptable accusation of hypocrisy.”

This isn’t the first time Winslet has railed against the thin-spin of Planet Celeb. In 2007 she accepted a settlement from Grazia magazine for incorrectly stating that she had attended a ‘diet doctor’. She also made a fuss in 2003 when GQ put a photo-shopped version of her body on the cover, stretching her legs to make them whippet thin. “It was important to me to let people know that digital retouching happens all the time,” she said then.

It’s easy to see why magazines and newspapers repeatedly get Kate wrong. Almost all of her peers keep quiet about the re-touching, deny that their Tussaud-faces have encountered Botox and rave about their love of chocolate while their newborns play the xylophone on their ribcages — so why wouldn’t she? Her settlement is one in the eye not just for those phoney stars, but for the obsequious media whose daily inventions and falsehoods prop up their industry.

The ironic thing is that compared to many of her colleagues — the swollen Megan Fox, the miserable looking Jennifer Aniston, the sinewy, alien-faced Desperate Housewives — Kate Winslet is brimming with health, sex appeal and contentment. In last year’s The Reader, her naked scenes caused audible ripples of excitement not just from understandably impressed men, but also from women gladdened and grateful to see that a fleshy, cushiony, mothering body which Winslet once cheerfully said had a backside like ‘purple sprouting broccoli’ could be so irrefutably desirable.

Yesterday I randomly bought four weekly women’s magazines. Flicking through them, I counted 18 features about celebrity beauties and their diet or fitness regime, including ‘A Day in the Diet of Jayne Middlemiss’, three pieces on Natalie Cassidy (‘ I’m so happy to be a size 12 again’), a consideration of the ‘diet secrets’ that help Liz McClarnon maintain her size 8 figure, and a look inside Emma Crosby of GMTV’s fridge.

The blandness of these items is vaguely amusing, but the fascistic focus on how to get to a ‘svelte size 10’ or less is depressing. Life is simply too short for dieting and three-hour exercise routines.

Of course it’s important to eat quite healthily and get off your fat ass sometimes, but it’s more important to think for yourself, read some good books, form decent relationships and have fun. As Kate Winslet clearly knows, getting into a size 10 dress is nice, but getting a life is nicer.