It's summer, or at least what passes for summer in Ireland, and every second woman is either on a diet, or thinking about going on a diet, or breaking a diet, or talking about a diet to another woman, or in this writer's case, writing about diets, writes Breda O'Brien
Now, isn't it odd that this obsession with dieting exists in parallel with the fact that we are getting fatter as a nation?
Well, it's not odd at all really, because we all know that dieting makes you fat. After a diet you pile on the pounds as your starving cells shout, "Yippee! The famine is over!" and proceed to zealously squirrel away all they can to protect against the next famine. We know that, but frankly, we don't care.
All we care about is that we are afraid to lie down on an Irish beach in case the only other creature there that has more blubber is a seal. We care about the fact that all our cultural icons are so skinny that they make coat hangers look obese, while we fear that a swing from just one of our sagging underarms could knock out a grown man.
We speak about diets in terms of getting healthy, but all we want to do is get gorgeous. Our mates may tell us they love cuddly women, but we know that the last famous and sexy woman who fitted that description was Marilyn Monroe, and she's been dead for 40 years. And don't talk about Sophie Dahl, who turned out to be a long, leggy girl who had just "tested and tasted too much, lover", and who shed the pounds with ease when she got bored with that image.
You could learn to hate ectomorphs. They are the tall, skinny ones that you can't fatten even if you try. An ectomorph friend of mine used to say smugly to me that you can't fatten a thoroughbred, until I said grimly one day that you also shoot thoroughbreds when they break their legs, and I was seriously thinking about breaking hers. My bitterness might have something slight to do with the fact that as an endomorph, even if I lose weight I still have a round face, a round body and short legs, which Rubens might have appreciated, but he's dead even longer than Marilyn Monroe.
In our society we have stored up all the disapproval we used to vent on public sinners, and now we vent it on people who have over-stretched fat cells. Being fat is one of the last taboos, and if you want to make people seriously uncomfortable, use the adjective to describe yourself. The kindly liar type of person rushes to reassure you that you are not fat, merely plump, well-built, curvy, and anyway you have a very nice face. Why people think that everything above the neck being reasonably OK will comfort you is beyond me.
Then there are the scolds, who fall into two categories. There are the ones who tell you sternly that you must immediately get yourself to Weight Watchers. Faint protests that you have spent months of your life there are ignored as evidence of weak will or lies.
Then there are the other scolds, who tell you that the Western world is obsessed with weight, and that even if you were 20 stone that you must love yourself as you are. Which is true, up to a point, because the acceptable weight for women is based on having the shape of an adolescent boy but with Dolly Parton-like assets, which without surgery was not that realistic an aspiration even for Dolly Parton. However, being fat has demonstrable negative impacts on health, so while loving yourself as you are may be grand, loving yourself into a cardiac arrest or adult onset diabetes is not quite so intelligent.
It is a fact, though, that yo-yo dieting is more injurious to your health than maintaining a steady, if over-generous weight. Funny how the dieting industry never mentions that. It is probably too busy spreading confusion and earning millions. Let's look at a just a few examples. The Zone diet beloved of Hollywood stars demands that you operate as a human calculator, because allegedly a failure to meet the exact ratios of protein, carbs and fats at every meal will start all sorts of deadly cascades of insulin, forcing fat into your cells.
Dr Atkins, on the other hand, believes that steak, mayonnaise, double cream and eggs are health foods, but that a carrot is lethal. Then there's Dr Mercola, who operates an extraordinarily popular website. Here's his programme for health. No sugar, no margarine or trans fatty acids, no milk, no fruit juices, no pork, no wheat, no rice unless it is roasted first, no corn, no potatoes, no shellfish, no bananas or oranges and no salt. Oh, and no dental fillings and no anti-perspirant.
He does allow buffalo, venison and lamb, which he rather oddly says "are game animals and contain fewer pesticides". Lambs? What do they hunt where Dr Mercola hangs out?
Not even the USDA food pyramid is to be trusted, apparently. One lobby says that all that grain and pasta will have you barrel-shaped before you can say carbo, while another lobby says that the pyramid's failure to distinguish between good and bad fats is what has us all depressed, with sagging, rapidly ageing skin and you guessed it, fat.
All of this would be rather grimly funny, if it did not mean that there are thousands of women out there looking for the magic anti-fat formula, and postponing being happy till they find it. My husband says mildly he has noticed that people who don't obsess about their weight, and who concentrate on getting fit by walking briskly a few times a week, seem to be more successful than frantic calorie counters. God love him, I don't hate him even though he is an ectomorph, because he does a pretty good job of cherishing this grumpy endomorph.
However, he has as much hope of popularising that message as Dr Mercola has of tucking into a Big Mac, large fries and a milkshake. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go hunt a lamb.