I'm sick, looking at Carol Voderman's body. I can't even watch Countdown without feeling queasy. This is because I accidentally caught sight of her on the cover of a magazine wearing that most horrendous item of clothing, the stretch-satin, plunge neck leotard, writes Roisin Ingle.
I can't get the vision of pale blue awfulness out of my head.
Yes, I admit that perhaps it was a mistake to actually buy the magazine, but I simply couldn't resist. "Get my body in two weeks," gushed good old Carol on the cover. I needed to know how.
Turns out it's pretty simple. Eat fresh food, says Carol. Drink water, says Carol. Eat when you are hungry and enjoy it, says Carol. The Detox Queen has a very good reason for squeezing into dodgy gym gear and spouting such hoary nutritional chestnuts. She has released another version of her massively successful diet book where you basically live on oatcakes, vegetables and brown rice for a couple of weeks.
The woman has an IQ of approximately seven million and here she is insulting our intelligence by peddling the idea that after 14 days of sweet potatoes, soya yoghurt and millet we can all look like her. It's a blatant lie, of course, but even if it was possible, the question I kept asking myself was, did I really want Carol Voderman's stretch-satin-friendly body?
There was a time when I'd have jumped at the chance but I'm not so sure any more. I've had a lifetime of feeling uncomfortable in my skin. Walking into and slumping out of changing rooms. A lifetime of hoping my personality would make up for the bulges and the shirts that never quite fit. Shopping in Evans. Refusing to shop in Evans. Losing a stone. Gaining two. Searching for the hidden codes in other people's words.
You look well, they might say, but what they really mean is, Thank God you've lost a bit of weight. Or they smile hello and say nothing, covertly looking you up and down. This, you soon learn, means, God, look at the state of her, she's let herself go. Again.
I've counted points. I've ditched carbs. I've supped on cabbage soup. I've given every single regime up every single time. I can't even laugh and blame my fats on the fact that I love my food, which, it should go without saying, I do. The real problem is that I've always used and abused food, treating it as an emotional life-raft which I could cling to when the water got too choppy. I do it much less now than I did when I was younger, but I still do it all the same.
The other week, for example, I was facing into a whole load of work and stressing about stuff I was powerless to change. I went, naturally, to the supermarket. Half an hour later, I had guzzled down a chicken tikka wrap, two caramel slices, two crisp sandwiches and a slice of apple pie. An hour later, I went to a friend's house for dinner and consumed a beautiful beef stir-fry with brown rice followed by ice-cream and slices of fresh mango smothered in Baileys. It's an old trick, this using food as ballast to get through a stormy day. But it just doesn't work. I see that more clearly now, which is why these food-attacks occur less frequently. But they still happen now and again.
I don't know whether Michelle McManus, the large young woman who won Pop Idol, has food attacks. She was pictured recently on a holiday in Barbados wearing a modest black swimming costume. The captions to these pictures which made the front page of one tabloid were depressingly predictable and utterly offensive. Michelle's response? "I'm big, happy and sexy." She even had the audacity to sound like she meant it.
Then someone made the point that if an anorexic woman was photographed splashing listlessly about in the sea and later heard declaring herself to be "skinny, happy and sexy" there would be an outcry and she would be packed off to the nearest hospital. They had a point - political correctness has gone too far when morbid obesity is seen as an acceptable rather than unhealthy condition - but it brought home to me how difficult it is for some people to accept that happy and fat are not mutually exclusive states.
It took me a while to make up my mind about whether I should be offended by the woman who wrote to me recently asking if I wanted to join her "shed a stone from home" programme. I decided not to take offence. It's hardly wrong for her to have thought that, being overweight, I would want to do something about it in the comfort of my own home. And I do, in a way. But not because people like Carol Voderman have the arrogance to think I want a body like theirs. What I want is a body like mine. But could I have it in a slightly smaller size, please?