It's the time of year when many of us read diet books. A better plan would be to take their advice with a pinch of salt - and whatever else you fancy, within reason, writes Kathryn Holmquist
I've lost 10 stone. Want to know how I did it? Easy, really. From the age of about 15 - which is late by today's standards - I started worrying about my weight. Having a mother who was constantly on a diet helped. She wore plastic bags while gardening, just to lose weight. All the diet gurus - Atkins, Scarsdale and so on - were lying around the house. There were pills in the family medicine chest to get rid of "fluid", so what was the harm?
Teachers helped, too. Like the French lecturer who interspersed inspired streams of consciousness on Jean-Paul Sartre and Gustave Flaubert with the handy tip that eating what you like every second day, and starving on the days in between, is a sure way to keep your figure. Surely, Madame Bovary was lost without such insights.
In other words, if my mother hadn't had the information, someone else would have provided it. In the kitchen was a calorie chart (glass of orange juice: 105 calories), the metabolism chart (walk around the block: 50 calories) and the food diary (ate only 1,000 calories today: I'm a good person). Then came college: eating communally in the dining hall and competing to see who could last longest on raw vegetables and soy sauce.
I was dancing at the time. Dancers are brilliant when it comes to losing weight. They know all about eating lasagne and chocolate cake occasionally, then throwing up afterwards. We'd never heard of bulimia. The greatest reward was being told we were too thin. I was travelling a lot - time-zone stuff. Living on cigarettes and espressos. Whenever I stepped off a plane into my mother's arms, she would exclaim at my thinness. Brilliant!
Then came the payback. Having starved myself in my teens, I reached my 20s and couldn't eat anything without gaining weight. When I stopped dancing, my voluptuousness emerged - with an extra pound for every one of the 10 I ever lost. That is the truth - and you can have it for free. Don't diet. Dieting makes you fat by lowering your metabolic rate.
As Shelley Bovey explains in What Have You Got To Lose? The Great Weight Debate And How To Diet Successfully, dieting makes you fatter.
There is only one way to have a body as beautiful as your soul: don't obsess about what you eat. As Susie Orbach shows in On Eating, enjoying food in a sensual way is the healthy way.
I've read both books. Having written about health matters for many years, I have a cynical eye, and my advice generally is not to read diet books. Especially not in January, when the publishers are pushing them. Diet books just get you into weird thinking about food. Best not to think about food at all. A Norwegian survey showed that people who are 30 per cent overweight live longer. Yo-yo dieting is medically proven to be worse than obesity.
So why worry? Eat what feels good, and enjoy it in moderation. Feel the chocolate. Get in touch with your inner food emotions. Stop when you're full. Start thinking too much about chocolate and a kilo won't be enough. Morsels here and there are fine. So far, so good.
That's my philosophy. That's also what Orbach says, so when her latest book landed in the door, I broke my rule about not reading diet books in January. After all, Orbach is the author of Fat Is A Feminist Issue, the 1978 book that was supposed to stop us dieting forever. Her book opened the door, so I was even more susceptible to considering the last diet of my life, which is what Bovey suggests in What Have You Got To Lose? These two books are daunting reads by daunting women, each in her own way.
Bovey was 20 stone and hated it. Orbach, a psychologist, was never obese but had a lot of clients with food issues. Their careers took various turns. Bovey is a former fat activist who wrote two books celebrating women's rights to be "fat" - horrible word - then decided that being "obese" - equally horrible word - was its own form of oppression. So she lost six stone. The first half of her diet book declares that being overweight is bad only if you buy into dysfunctional cultural messages.
THE second half says if you really are overweight then you have to stay on a diet for life. It seems contradictory. She's saying that if you want to lose weight, you have to exert superhuman self-control and limit your calorie intake. Whether it's Rosemary Conley or Weight Watchers. Never let your eye off the ball. If you do, you're finished. All the dieting has led to a lowering of your metabolic rate, meaning that you'll have to keep it up. Does this sound new? How many times have you read this? Do you want to read it again? This leaves us with Orbach, the curvy pixie, the feminist intellectual.
Orbach thinks the dieting industry is a con, and scales are for fish (not dieters). If 95 per cent of diets fail, how could anyone but the most cynical promote them? You'd expect this from Orbach. Her new book says we should listen to our bodies and learn to know when we're hungry. If we understand hunger, we'll know that hunger usually isn't about food. When we're hungry, we want something else. Loving, usually. She's right.
No way is Orbach ever going to be fat herself, however. I know her. She likes a beer and a cigarette. She stops at one - one beer, one cigarette, two mouthfuls of mousse. She picks at her food. So what if she was Princess Diana's therapist? Is that a recommendation? She won't say a word about it apart from the occasional anecdote.
As in how embarrassed she was when she helped Diana to escape from journalists who were stalking her, which meant Diana had to ride in Orbach's messy car. (Any mother of young children will sympathise.)
The combined effect of reading these two books by these two exceptionally self-controlled women - one who lost six stone, the other who refuses to talk about losing weight at all because she doesn't have to - was that I entered a dieting frame of mind. As usually happens on the cusp of a new year. So do I do a Bovey, and embark on the last diet of my life, or an Orbach, and enjoy every mouthful I take, hoping for the best? I go for Orbach.
If, like me, you were reared in a fat-obsessed age, reading Bovey and Orbach is pointless now. However, I would recommend giving Orbach to your daughters, to show them it's not what you eat, but how you eat, that matters. Enjoy your food. Never diet. Then you will never have to lose weight.
What Have You Got To Lose? The Great Weight Debate And How To Diet Successfully, by Shelley Bovey, published by The Women's Press, £9.99 in UK; On Eating, by Susie Orbach, published by Penguin, £4.99 in UK