THE FORMER BIG Brother contestant who has stoked international criticism for his Twitter campaign to promote “managed anorexia” has said it was all a hoax.

Kenneth Tong, tweeting as @MrKennethTong, had been posting comments such as:

Don’t let the fat masses oppress you from your goals. You deserve a skinny body.

and,

Thankful for this global opportunity to help girls all over the world know that to be skinny is to be perfect & to be fat is unacceptable.

Tong, who was a contestant in the 2009 series of Big Brother in the UK, said he was promoting ‘size zero’ as the bodily ideal and would soon be launching a ‘size zero’ slimming pill. His stream of tweets since January 1 was criticised heavily by media outlets, eating disorder groups and other commentators.

Celebrities also waded into the argument with pop star Rihanna and One Tree Hill actress Sophia Bush personally tweeting him to voice their concern that he was influencing young women to starve themself to have “skinny arms”.

Now Kenneth Tong, who described himself on Big Brother as a “playboy” from Hong Kong, claims his tweets were all part of proving an argument with a friend that he could become a “globally recognized figure within a week harnessing the power of the internet”. He tweeted today at 15.40 this message:

I think it is time for to come clean. The whole size zero thing is a hoax. It came about after an interesting discussion I had with a friend of mine. The discussion centered round whether it was possible, to go from nowhere to be a globally recognized figure within a week harnessing the power of the internet and specifically Twitter, which I have always maintained is a better medium than national TV.

My friend said it wasn’t possible. I said it was.

To prove him wrong, I decided as a hoax to promote via Twitter something that was universally appalling, I chose managed anorexia. I would like to make it clear, I chose the subject as a hoax as I knew it’d be appalling to men and women.

The campaign has worked; I have been a Trending topic on Twitter for over a week. I am scheduled to appear on TV, the Press and Radio shows, over the course of the next week: Grazia, Telegraph, The Sun, The Sunday Times etc.

Now it’s time to come clean and stop the bandwagon. My honest personal opinion on managed anorexia is it is an disgusting and illogical idea. It is a mental illness. It cannot be managed.

To all the people I have offended as part of this scientific experiment, I would like to apologize to you and to show my sincerity I will making a sizeable donation to beat: the leading UK charity for people with eating disorders and their families.

Furthermore, I have decided to auction my custom Apple iPod Nano watch on Ebay, the proceeds from this will be going to the charity, beat.