The Skinny on Nicole (Celebrity Secrets)

Nicole Richie has opened up on a weighty matter.


In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the Simple Life star reveals that she's well aware she doesn't have enough meat on her very prominent bones.

"I know I'm too thin right now, so I wouldn't want any young girl looking at me and saying, 'That's what I want to look like,' " Richie tells the magazine in its June issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

"I do know that they will, which is another reason I really do need to do something about it," she says. "I'm not happy with the way I look right now."

When Richie was first introduced to television audiences as Paris Hilton's Simple Life sidekick in 2003, she was noticeably heavier, appearing chunky when compared to the stork-like Hilton.

But by the time the second season of the show rolled around, Richie was drastically thinner...and still shrinking.

In interviews, Richie repeatedly denied that she was suffering from an eating disorder, attributing the extra pounds she was carrying on the first season to weight she gained while in rehab for heroin addiction.

"I've never owned a scale," she told the New York Times in November. "But I think people forget that I was on this earth 21 years before Simple Life and I've always been very thin. I just went through a heavier stage."

However, Hilton, her former best friend who's known her since childhood, has claimed that she was shocked by Richie's newly svelte appearance.

"I can't believe it. That's not normal. She looks horrible. It's really sad," Hilton told Elle magazine.

Despite Richie's claim that she eats "the worst foods--salty cheese-and-grease kind of stuff," she tells Vanity Fair that she simply couldn't seem to gain any weight, especially following her breakup with ex-fiance DJ AM, aka Adam Goldstein.

"I had a bad breakup, and it eats me up inside when I'm upset about something," Richie, who is dating Goldstein again, tells the magazine.

"I tried to put the weight on my way, eating burritos, but that wasn't working, so I started seeing a nutritionist and a doctor."

Dr. Jeffery Wilkins, vice chair of the department of psychiatry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who treats Richie tells the magazine his team is "working on a systematic plan to get more calories in, and we're going to watch and see if it succeeds."

"If it's not anorexia, she should be able to gain the weight," he says. "If it ends up being anorexia, we'll help her with that."


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