Wouldn't it be great to feel happy?

You know, in your skin, just as you are, flab ‘n’ all happy.

I want that feeling so bad sometimes I can almost taste it. Taste, though, is my problem. Keeping a grip on the joy vibe is also up there on my checklist of things I’m crap at. It’s telephone directory size, as thick as my love handles and as incomprehensible at a quick glance.

So let’s cut to the chase and let me ask you one meaty question: How true to yourself are you? Can you stand up and say you’re dissatisfied with the way you or things in your life are? Are you honest?

I am. And it’s a big, big problem. Emotionally speaking, I’m as crumbly as Cheshire cheese. But I know that, and I can easily talk about why that is the case.

What I’m not prepared for, however, is how this attitude affects those closest to me. Let’s step back a bit though, and follow this through to its logical conclusion.

Last week, as I try to sell myself and my book based on these columns by being something of a media tart, I had a sniff of appearing in one of the nation’s biggest selling weekly women’s magazines.

This mag, which shall remain anonymous, loved my pictures, loved my story, loved my book, loved my attitude, loved me so much I could have been made out of chocolate instead of looking like I’ve been living on caravan-sized bars of the stuff for the past 35 years.

My publisher, my friends, the girls in work were whooping for joy at the thought of the book finally – finally! – reaching people over the Bridge. This could be IT, they all salivated – the kind of “it” that would put me up there with the literary greats. Yes, the people who wrote the Slimming World manual. So I was all set, ready for my BIG media break, even considering having my hair cut for the pictures, even if they were of me straddling a chip pan fryer.

And then… and then… and then came another email.

“We still want to do the feature,” it said. “But we want to make sure you’re okay with the angle we’re taking. You are, aren’t you, fine with your body? You’re at peace, right? You’ve stopped dieting and think you’re fabulous. You’re a size 16-18, yeah? You’ve finally accepted yourself the way you are. Agreed?”

Er, no. Not exactly. So, what would you do in my situation?

On the one hand, you’ve got your publisher breathing down your neck to do whatever it takes to sell books, got people’s well wishes to deal with, plus the added pressure of feeling that if you admit to feeling fine about yourself, wouldn’t you have spent the last god knows how many years living a lie? Wouldn’t the basic plot of the book – the ups and down of my dieting life, the way it has ALWAYS affected my self-esteem and outlook on life – then be a sham? Just like the time I tried to live on cereal for a week.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pretend to be happy and content as I am when, let’s face it, every day is a battle with myself. Do you know what I mean?

I was gutted, but if you can’t be true to yourself, what do you have left?

Chicken fajitas, Green and Blacks with orange bits in and a burger from the Hard Rock Café for a start (at least that’s what I consoled myself with after the second email).

But – and here’s the rub – being true to who I FEEL I am has other consequences.

They also hurt my mother.

The other day I was on the radio, the Jamie and Louise Show on Radio Wales, talking about Diary of a Diet: A Little Book of Big. We laughed, we had fun, we had chocolate ice-cream for god’s sake.

After the show, I called Mam Jones thinking she would shower me with praise about how wonderful/funny/fantastic/ insightful I had been. Instead she picked up the phone in tears, wondering why my “act” – for want of a better description about being a Z-list fat “celebrity” – is based on putting myself down.

As Jo Brand says in the foreword to my book, you might as well have a laugh about who and what you are, if who and what you are is bigger than those who are having a laugh at your expense anyway.

I tried to articulate this to the world’s number one Han Fan, otherwise known as my mother, but nothing would assuage her. As far as she’s concerned, her pride at me – her daughter with the job, the achievements, the book, the big eyes and big hair – isn’t dependent on the success I get from being a “fat” author. Which means she’s unable to listen to me having a laugh at why I love corned beef rolls, the comedy of errors that has been my love life and the way I can easily self-negate when it comes to worshipping at the altar of carbohydrates.

“You’re as good as anyone else,” were her words, radio turned to off. “You’re as lovely, as beautiful, as clever, as good damn it. Why do you have to put yourself down all the time?”

“But Mam…”

“But Mam bloody nothing. To me you’ll always be a little girl holding my hand, the funniest little thing with the biggest eyes and the widest smile. You are more than the numbers on a bloody scales. You are my daughter. And I love you. I’m proud of you. But I won’t listen to you do this to yourself, however funny people might think you are.”

I felt like a porn star, the kind of person who has to keep what they do from the people they love because they know it’ll hurt them.

The irony, of course, is that by not admitting I feel more than I do about myself, that my self-esteem is fatter, I’ve ruined my chance of reaching more people who’ve weighed out their self-esteem along with their chips.

I told Mam Jones about the woman’s mag conundrum and she understood, said I shouldn’t sell myself out or admit to being less than I am. Go figure.

But somehow, doing the opposite doesn’t seem to be enough today either.

Imagine for a second ...

... a glossy magazine has decided you’re important enough to do a big spread on you.

Let’s say, for example, you are the kind of famous which warrants five colour pages of pictures and copy, numerous costume changes and you looking all loved up with your other half.

You’re not famous enough to warrant a front cover or get a big chunk next to Madonna’s hand vein specialist, or anything like that.

But, because you were once “up there” with the greats, such as Atomic Kitten and Bewitched, you’re still big enough to get arse-end coverage, your status now resigned to starting on page 94.

Claire Richards, who was once a Deeper Shade of Blue in the pop group Steps, found herself in this situation in last week’s OK! magazine when the crew went round her house to take pictures of her, partner Reece Hill and newborn baby Charlie.

Ostensibly there to mark the birth (and give the rest of us a good nose through their house), once they clapped eyes on her they appeared to be more interested in one thing: Claire’s gone fat.

Bandmates Ian ‘H’ Watkins – the Welsh one – Faye Tozer, Lisa Scott-Lee – oops, sorry, I forgot she’s from Rhyl – and Lee Latchford-Evans continued to live their lives in the spotlight, it seems that “shy Claire”, instead of bathing in the flashes of paparazzi bulbs, has spent her time eating cake off radar.

Happy as a pig in the proverbial she might have been, but because she’s had to face the cameras once again, her chocolate covered love-ins are apparent for all the world to see.

Now me being me, and seeing with two big bold eyes instead of seeing through a judgmental skinny lens, can safely say she doesn’t look as fit as she did when she was the main “voice” of Steps.

Sue me, but she doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean she looks awful. She just looks like a happy, size-16-plus-new-mum.

Everyone knows that people are, by and very bloody large, more attractive when they’re smaller.

But – and here’s the clincher – if there wasn’t a picture printed alongside the piece to remind us of her slim days in Steps, you’d just think, oh, there’s a nice looking girl.

But not the writers at the magazine. Nope, they went to town on the fact she’s put on loads of weight, kindly souls that they are.

Of course they do all the invariable oohing and aaahing over the baby, asking the inevitable questions about late nights, the shock of giving birth and celebrity godparents.

And then, after lulling the poor dab into a false sense of security, they go in for the kill.

From asking “how is the nappy changing?” they clomper stomper their way through with, “Are you planning to lose the baby weight in record time like most celebs, Claire?”

Nice, eh?

“I really want to lose the weight, but I’m not good without help,” said the singer, obviously choking on her family-sized bar of Galaxy.

“I have no discipline. I used to be in my Steps days and was happy to starve myself for a week.

“But I can’t do that any more. I try not to eat bad food, but it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I ate most of my birthday cake and the leftovers.

“When I was in Steps the routines would make it easy to stay trim.

“In fact, I got quite obsessed with trying to be slim and I didn’t go about it in the healthiest of ways. I never had an eating disorder, I just didn’t diet the best way – I’d eat one meal a day, which was stupid because I needed energy to do all those routines.

“Back then, I always thought I was the fat one in Steps. Now I look back and think, God, I wasn’t like that at all!”

We’ve all done it, haven’t we? Got obsessed about dieting, losing weight, keeping fit, eating, not eating, weighing out your chips along with your self-esteem.

Look at me – I’m back in diet class after saying I’d never go again, wondering if this plan, one of the many, will be THE ONE to help us move on with the basic art of living.

Or, and here’s a novel idea, it could be the plan which breaks the camel’s back of my dieting life, and we I accept myself as I am, warts ‘n’ flab ‘n’ imperfections ‘n’ all.

Claire, bless her, is even asked what she weighs, if she’s “down” about being the newly crowned queen of the Pop Star Gone To Seed gang and if – IF – she’d lose weight IF her boyfriend proposed to her.

They might as well have asked her to pull her heart out and let the skinny stylist stick her stillies in it then kick it around the room.

“Well I won’t go wedding dress shopping until I’ve lost the weight. I’d hate it.

“You have to look fabulous,” she says.

As if fabulous is measured in Pronuptia. Then again...