A RIGHT old jumble of thoughts ...

... mixing up along chaotically with the fat free strawberry yoghurt I had for breakfast. So big I think the Amercians would call it a cart. Or a quart. Whatever, it was massive.

Here’s what’s rumbling (sadly, it’s never my belly).

I’ve put on weight. I knew I had. I can just sense these things, like a half baked psychic, heavy on the sick.

The grand total of my dietary shortcomings is 8.5lbs. That’s in two months, which is how long it’s been since I last went to Fat Club.

I know it’s just over half a stone because I went back to Han Reunited FC last Monday, new (fat and thin) faces filled with hope lining up for a go on the scales.

FC teach, the biggest loser of them all in the best possible way, called me up to say welcome back. I said I’d put on 8.5lbs as my hello. She said not to worry. I said it was OK for her to say that, she’s lost 76876 of the buggers.

But to make her point, she said she’d been on holidays and put on 9.5lbs. That’s more than me, in case you’re rubbish at maths.

Since I last saw you, I asked. No, she said. Since holidays. Had you been away for two months, then? Two weeks, she said again. “I put on 9.5lbs in two weeks. It’s the b****** chocolate and lager. So you haven’t done so bad. God, I’m depressed.”

Chocolate and lager, not my weaknesses but I know that if I drank (I don’t) or was a chocoholic (I like a sneaky bar of Dairy Milk with the best of them, but it’s not a hankering) I’d be on her team.

I felt better, for a moment. Thinking that even if the biggest loser can put on - and she knows all the rules of the game, down to even having a special container with only her milk allowance in the fridge - I’m not as bad/crap/useless/human as I felt.

So I had two packets of crisps - low fat, in case you were wondering - to celebrate being so, well, human.

Anyway, two months ago I said to myself, as I tend to do in moments of clarity, that I’d try really, really hard to lose some more weight before my book launch, this coming Saturday in Cardiff (Waterstone‘s noon-2pm; WH Smith, 3pm-4pm if you‘re interested in having a copy and a free donut). So that I could go shopping in that magical land called ANYWHERE and pick up something nice.

My book’s out officially on Monday, based on these columns of mine. To give it its full title it’s Diary of a Diet: A Little Book of Big.

And guess what? I’m 8.5lbs heavier that I was two months ago. I’m so good at being bad I feel like a national treasure, so much so my face should be on tea towels so the Japanese tourists can take me home as a memento of What Not to Stuff when they come to Wales and fancy over-indulging on the Welsh fudge.

So what to wear to the launch? Something dramatic, Significant (thin) Other suggested. I reminded him that you can’t get Juicy couture in sour sized. Or the Fat ‘n’ Fabulous range in Principles.

A trip to Cardiff, then, to visit the Big Five of My Big Life - Chesca, Elvi, Anne Harvey, Box 2 and Evans, the total sum of my plus sized shopping experience.

Evans - sale stuff along one side of the shop, an abundance of leisure wear and stuff fat clubbers could make silly in. So, as you can imagine with one down and four shops left to go, disappointment started to jab.

Chesca - fine if you like glitzy cropped tops or were going to a wedding and didn’t mind going see-through.

Elvi and Anne Harvey - I’m 35, not 205.

Box 2 - £250 later I have two tops. Sufficiently dramatic, S(t)O panders. Hmpf, I tell myself, I think I look like Jo Brand dressed by Trinnie and Susannah I slam at him. Yes but Jo Brand liked your book so much she wrote its foreword, he tries again. (But my feet are hurting, thwarting anything getting through to my ears.) So, I goad, knowing how much he hates shopping for himself, what are you going to wear?

S(t)O, whose look is more crumpled Englishman abroad when he gives a damn, said we’d go to M&S.

To find a suit which looked like it belonged to an Englishman abroad, I ventured?

If they have it, he scowled.

S(t)O has the very same problem as me - he can’t find clothes to fit him as he’s the opposite end of the normality scale.

I’m fat, big bellied, tall and big boobed; he’s thin, flat bellied, tall with shoulders which Duncan Goodhew would covet, ones which he hates and I love.

I watch as he gets frustrated with himself, rally at the designers, wonder why he can’t get quirky in the long legged and lovely and big shouldered bloke’s section of M&S.

It’s like watching myself after a lifetime of being forced fed testosterone on rye.

Just try something on, I gently coax. Then came the clincher.

His “You don’t know what it’s like to be thin.”

No, I thought to myself, if you let yourself go and had three tidy meals a day, you’d slide into the normal zone.

And if I let myself go (even further), I’d need a vat of Vaseline to get my big fat arse through the swinging doors of the Last Fat Chance Saloon.

I’ve been crying today.

How many people tell you when they’re really down?

To be honest, I don’t give a stuff about being the kind of girl who doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve.

Remember, as a big bugger, I’m always in sleeves. I’m never bare armed.

That should tell you something about my emotional and mental well-being.

I know what’s caused it. I just don’t care much about acknowledging it. That’s my problem.

Yet, curiously, I know that if I don’t these peaks and troughs are going to continue to litter my life like the flakes of the FOUR bread rolls I ate in the car home from my mother’s the other day.

She gave me them to share out with Significant (thin) Other and housemate Hiya Love, along with some boiled ham.

But by the time I’d got to Morrisons on the top road in Ebbw Vale, two minutes away, I’d managed to light a fag while filling the buttered beauties with ham (AND pick out the fat and scary red bits) while driving.

I juggled guilt for a bit in the one hand too. Good, eh? I should be in the circus, me.

Then I had to walk into the house and mime to Hiya Love, like some half baked Lionel Blair, that I’d had all the food on the way down, making sure he knew what to say if Mam Jones phoned.

I also didn’t want S(t)O to get the gist of the exchange. Not that he’d mind, I don’t think – it’s just that he’s already seen me around the house without a bra on, I didn’t want to run the risk of him seeing me without my marbles.

The strange thing about tears, and about emotional razor blades in general, is that once you’re all cried out, when you’re free of the slump, you forget the real texture of sorrow.

All you know is that you had a feeling, a sensation so blue it was almost pornographic.

I’m like that now, oddly nostalgic – and starving – a few hours into my recovery time.

I don’t feel sad right at this very moment, but I am left with a real sense of palpable frustration with myself.

I can feel it, just like I feel my trousers getting tighter as a result of the indifference I’ve been suffering for the last few months, the type which manifests itself in crazy car journeys and dawn fridge raids.

Add another four rolls to my tally and I figure I’m now about 6,775 steps back from when I started to regain my sense of self by losing two stone off its carb-covered casing.

Things/stuff/comments, call exterior forces what you like, have conspired to make me feel like screaming at myself or apples, anything around me really, for being so bloody useless and self-defeating.

The rolling around with the rolls didn’t spark my most recent fall from the grace of personal equanimity, though. They were just the topping.

A tight bra, an evening out in a fashionable bar, an email which said “stop putting yourself down... you’re beautiful inside and out” (talk about missing the point of these columns), and someone getting upset about me never socialising with friends has me reeling.

I’m also facing up to the fact that I’ve put on weight, so much so that my cheeks are playing a game of kiss catch with my fringe.

It’s not hard for me to be candid about my weaknesses, or at least what I perceive them to be.

I’m so used to being so utterly uncomfortable in my own skin most of the time, it’s natural for me to talk about the unease when asked. It’s an almost light-hearted swipe at myself. But others don’t quite see it that way.

When I try to articulate this to people who are concerned about my well-being, those who prattle on about my weight NOT being an issue (Newsflash: It Is To Me), they don’t seem to like my answers to their questions.

“Why do you so rarely go out?” friends ask.

“Because I get so uncomfortable, especially after work and following a sneeze and wee session while everyone else appears to have dropped in after a make-up session heaven,” I tell them as they scowl.

“Why are you so hard on yourself?” someone else prattles.

“Because it’s so easy and I’ve got a leak in the self-confidence department,” I answer.

“But you LOOK confident, you ARE confident, you’re the life and soul when you do go out,” they reason.

Yeah, and Irony’s my mother’s other skinny daughter, this only fat child sometimes thinks to herself.

Can I just dispel ...

... a fat fact from the get go? Big birds don’t get up in the morning, step out of the shower and reach for an eclair before the deodorant.

It’s an urban myth, right up there with it’s not what you look like on the outside but how beautiful your heart is, or some such cereal packet absurdity.

Don’t you just love it when people assume that all you do is stuff your face all day long if you’re on the upper side of fabulous? Speaking as a card carrying member of the Fat ‘n’ Flawed gang, I’m too busy working out which diet plan I’m on from one minute to the next (depending on if I fancy carbs, cream cakes or taking up jogging) to think about what people really think about my eating habits or lifestyle choices.

To set the record straight, I have a really balanced diet – if you take that to mean a doughnut in each hand.

Seriously though, I eat well – I just sometimes eat too much of the good stuff. I’m also lazy, but I have the occasional spurt of activity.

I just forget to keep sight of the much bigger picture that is a healthier, fitter, more attractive me. In effect, I’m thin on balanced thinking.

Anyway, another fact about fat has been crushed this week which says that there’s no such thing as a naturally slim woman.

I’m reluctant to believe it though, that some of my thin gal pals aren’t naturally built that way despite stuffing themselves with all they like, and boozing too (at least that’s one sin I’m not guilty of).

I mean, if I ate and binged like they do, doesn’t it follow that I should be shaped like them?

Round’s a shape, right?

I have this relative who’s an egg-timer-shaped size 12 and she is positively dangerous around gateau.

Her idea of a good meal is an industrial-sized packet of pick‘n’mix followed by a pastie, McDonald’s ecstatic meal and ice-cream (mountain, not cone).

Apparently though, there’s no such thing as the skinny gene – just thin secrets, to which I obviously haven’t been privy to.

Genetics expert Dr Liz Kingsley has spent the last few years researching why some women seem to stay slim effortlessly while the rest of us chubby-faced mortals appear to balloon by feet around the belly area, rather than age-induced inches.

And her conclusion? Nobody’s born slim, but star figures belonging to bootylicious Tyra Banks to toothpick tastic Victoria Beckham are the result of hard work, not some genetic predisposition.

The brainbox says, “Many people believe they are a victim of genetics, particularly since the ‘fat gene’ was discovered earlier this year.

“This gene, which makes people more prone to store fat, affects one in six.

“However, our genes haven’t changed in centuries – one in six of our grandparents had this gene too, yet far fewer people were obese then.

“People with that fat gene are only predisposed to carry an extra 6lb, which can’t account for the current obesity crisis. The problem is down to lifestyle, not genetics.” It follows, then, that since these genes haven’t made you fat or plump or looking like you’ve got too much junk in the trunk, they also didn’t give slimmer girls hollow legs. Hmpf. Just nicer ones. “In my research,” bleats the shock doc, “I discovered the main difference between those who remain slim and those who don’t is behaviour.

“The good news is these ‘slim attitudes’ can be learned, leading to permanent weight loss.”

So where can you get a list of dos and don’ts that’ll make you lose weight without following that tried and tested old fashioned formula, living on fags and cheap cider? In the doc’s book, Thin Secrets (Bubbly Publishing).

I’ve dipped in – without the aid of a cheese straw, thank you very much – and found four rules of thinbalina etiquette.

1 Slim people have slim habits Don’t assume slim people are shaped that way without much effort. Compare their lifestyle and activity level to that of your common or garden lardy a*** and you’ll see all the evidence you’ll need, says Dr Liz.

2 Slim people make their size a priority Did you know that being slim doesn’t just happen, you have to make it happen? Who knew! You should see the work I had to put into being a size 22.

3 Slim people don’t ignore small changes Slimmies, I assume because they can get up out of a chair quicker, take action as soon as they notice a difference in the way their jeans fit.

4 Slim people don’t diet They don’t ban food, eat cereal morning, noon and night, avoid chocolate on a Wednesday at 4.17pm precisely or think that if they diet in January, they can “stock-up” at Christmas.

But it’s hard to change the habits of a lifetime, isn’t it?

I can make excuses about the way my mind works, but I find it so very hard to make the right choices when it comes to feeling less fat in the head.

Do you ever do that thing where ...

... you imagine you’re interesting enough to be on the telly?

I do it all the time. It started from the earliest age, where I would hold conversations with Noel Edmonds and tell him why I’d brought on a Hammond organ and battered Welsh hat with just the one piece of ribbon on Swap Shop.

From there, a fantasy fast car would drive me to the Tiswas studios and I’d file fake papers with Sally James to prove I was an Over Eight and not an Under Eight, the age I seemed to be forever in those little days of wanting to be big (not in the way you’re thinking).

Perhaps the Phantom Flan Flinger would persuade me to sing a song while being doused with water, baked beans and custard, getting the words out while I did that thing which everyone seemed to do – carry on while making a big show of flinging said flung stuff out of my eyes and blowing the remnants of pink goo out of my mouth (not without having a sneaky taste first, just in case it was blancmange).

If I was on This Is Your Life, Eamonn Andrews would allow animals on for the first time in the show’s history. Sat next to me would be Tudor the dog, Shortie the Shetland Pony and Head Like A Football, my black cat with a head like a, well, football.

I’m not sure if I’ve grown out of this metaphysical sideline of mine, as on the weekend I was watching The Taste of My Life.

By the time it had finished, and Nigel Slater was cooking Griff Rhys Jones something with eels, crabs and other fishy fodder, I’d been filmed stuffing my face with a chicken dinner, making a corned beef roll and doing “frothy coffee” in the microwave.

In case you haven’t seen it, The Taste Of My Life’s premise is essentially a very simple one. Slater gets to talk to a celeb, makes some of their favourite dishes, and by the magic of oil, nuts, refined flour and fancy white plates, he works out what type of person they are and narrates their biography in light of it.

Who knew eels could be so interesting and tell Slater our lad had been to Oxford? I guess kebab and chips may signify my alma mater, Cardiff University (onions, just to remind me to cry again, speaking of my Cambridge rejection letter).

Griff, posh paws that he is, so freakily health minded he hasn’t had any kind of carbohydrate for five years, was banging on about smoked haddock omelettes, shoulder of lamb, sushi, pumpkin soup and crab in the story of his culinary life.

I guess for a foodie-cum- cook like Slater, it made for an interesting menu.

On that basis, I fear that if he came round my house to relive my misshaped past, he’d have a heart attack. Or die of pre-packaged, deep frosted boredom.

What would he make of me in relation to my history of food choices and faves?

There’s nothing fancy in there, no unusual delicacies, no restaurant quality cooking.

My favourite meal is my mother’s chicken Sunday dinner – home-made gravy (no stock cube as I can taste it through doors), Yorkshire puddings, swede and potato mash, Birds Eye peas, chopped up cauliflower, mint sauce (not garden fresh, but the bottled stuff). Very specific.

Then there’s Hiya Love’s lasagne or his concoction of chicken breasts (ALWAYS boneless and skinless) stuffed with smoked bacon (all traces of fat cut off), topped with mozzarella (kind of fancy I guess) done in a red wine and garlic sauce combo.

I love a basic pizza, dipping the crusts in garlic mayonnaise if I’m lucky and nobody’s looking, steak well done (one drip of red and I’m done for) on the barbecue and perhaps a simple chicken salad (see above instructions), freshly baked bread and strawberry jam (without the bits in), followed by school-made chocolate pudding and white custard. Again, god’s in the details of the finish.

That’s it. Not much is there?

I’d like to think that maybe my choices say that I’m just a normal girl who sometimes gets tied up in specifics, someone with traditional tastes who simply knows what she likes.

(Or should that really be likes what she knows? Maybe that’s at the heart of it.)

And if lack of eels, crabs and lamb shank puts me in the dullard corner and makes me the culinary equivalent of watching paint dry, I’m not all that bothered.

Because you always have time for a fried egg and red sauce sandwich (crispy on the one side, bread lightly toasted) before even considering starting to gloss the skirting boards.