It's all in the face.

It’s a lovely face, fine boned, smiley, with a mouth full of the whitest teeth I think I’ve ever seen.
There’s a mop of bleached blonde hair too, with streaks of white running wild through it, like she’s been sunning herself on Bondi Beach but remembered to lavish herself with Factor 500 at the roots.
Somehow, though, she wishes it wasn’t.
Because, for Betsan Rees, she’d rather have the face of a bulldog licking the sap from a stingy nettle than a great face and big body.
She’s what’s known in polite society as bottom heavy – tiny up top, bigger down below.
Bets cor has always been like it – but now she’s had enough. So to “shame” herself into doing something about it, she allowed a film crew to follow her as she tried to shed the pounds and start living for the moment.
She’s had enough in the past, of course. Like any yo-yo dieter, or woman who has weighed out their self-esteem with the exact amount of cheese all diet plans tell you to have on your toast, she’s lived where she’s felt, to use her words, “that I had a face from Baywatch, and a body from Crimewatch”.
Like me, and possibly like you if you’ve ever had a problem with food or thinking your hip/thigh ratio is what makes you that bad kind of EXTRA special, she’s been up more times than she’s been down. And I’m not talking sunny moods here either.
Bets has been 26 stones at her heaviest, slogging around a 30 plus body topped with that pretty little head.
Instead of feeling fine and accepting at size 16 or 18 or dreamy size 20 (for me at least), she’s self-medicated with ice-cream, chocolate and the ability to buy bigger trousers on her stylist’s salary.
Yes, to make matters worse, in a fatter, more glamorous life our 32-year-old girl from Trebanos worked as a stylist on the likes of as with American Vogue, the Welsh rugby team, Footballers’ Wives and the film Gladiator, even making a prosthetic belly for the fabled WAGs and having to listen to a size 8 actress on the latter asking our big bottomed gala if their Malteser-like buttocks looked big in a tight toga.
She says that working in that industry, shopping for people who were the size of her left thigh, made her feel “like a kid in a sweet shop who wasn’t allowed to taste a bloody thing”, like some well fed but not so Tiny Tim with their fat cheeks pressed up against the stores that keep big buggers out by keeping sizes tight.
In an emotional documentary that’s on tonight, tues you can watch her as she embarks on a personal journey to conquer both her weight problem and her complex issues with food.
For Bets, food has been both a comfort and a curse because she’s used it as a crutch when times, circumstances and rugby losses have got her down.
She’s not had it easy – her brother and father died early, and her mother has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.
And she’s found company in the kitchen cupboards, the graveyard of the inch-loss losers.
Weighing 23 stones seven months ago, she felt she’d reached rock bottom after being refused gastric bypass surgery which would involve stapling her stomach, experts claiming that her “circumstances weren’t exceptional”.
At this point, she felt she had no hope as her weight was affecting every area of her life – her social life, her health, her relationships.
Cameras followed her progress as she worked with personal trainer Mered Pryce and clinical psychologist Dr Manon Griffiths.
And now, almost seven stones lighter and still with a penchant for ice-cream but also low impact aerobics twice a day, she feels she may, just may, have broken the cycle once and for all.
At the end of it, she admits that she’s scared of people who now know what she weighs because it’s still considerable; she doesn’t want anyone to judge her on where she’s at now, only how far she’s come.
So let’s get that over and done with now: She’s 16st 13lb. How great is that?
“I really pushed myself during the making of this documentary,” she told me, over a lunch of pasta, pine nuts and two Diet Cokes.
“It was so, so hard.
“I felt I was having a live autopsy, that I was being dissected in public. Now I feel I want to do more to help people in my situation.”
And she’s started by showing that emotions aren’t nuisances which need to be cooled down with Häagen-Dazs.
Or concealed by a lovely face.