I have not so much fallen off the wagon ...

... as broken the floor on the way down and cracked a few ribs.

Metaphorically speaking of course.

Like every other diet I’ve been on, I was doing so damn well before I forgot to be good when the stresses and strains of life got in the way.

And now I can’t see the way back to the path of fat-free self-righteousness.

It’s such hard work, isn’t it? Watching what you eat and therefore think all the time. And I’ve had a belly full.

What happens then is that I start to eat ice-cream with such a ferocity I can’t help but think I’m being liberated and resigned and tough and grown-up about beating myself up in this way.

I’ll go through maybe a week of thinking I’ve finally emancipated myself until I see someone who looks happy in their skin and I start comparing myself with them. I always lose that battle.

The other day, while being unwittingly caught up in a fancy wedding in Llandeilo, I got so depressed by the sheer slim-line beauty and happiness of it all that I told my ever-suffering fiancee that I wasn’t going to get married.

It was pointless, I reasoned, because I’d never look as nice as a “normal” bride.

At that moment I had visions of me looking like a dumpling in a hanky.

We’ll have to cancel it, I moaned, as I can’t wear high heels for two minutes let alone all day. Phone the caterer, I demanded, and tell them we don’t want pasties and pies and big rolls with bits in because that’s what a FAT BRIDE would want.

Just take the ring back, I cried, because it’s lost on my eclair like, pudgy finger anyway.

I was in a right state, I can tell you – and the fact I was having an emotional meltdown while stuffing a two scoop ice-cream cone from the choc/cake shop Heavenly (perfect name, that) wasn’t lost on me either.

If anything, it made me loathe my shape even more.

I wish, wish, wish I was someone who didn’t compare myself to other women.

It’s an occupational hazard, and one that’s compounded by the fact that I really go to town on my perceived short-comings when diets fail. It’s 10 times worse then, a troublesomeness which eats at me.

I have to wonder, though, if my psychological makeup would still be prone to such weighty musings, even if I was a “normal” size.

Honestly, I think I’d be exactly the same. Me being me I’m bound to find something to pick up, some fantasy itch to scratch.

The irony, of course, is that I’m largely a contented soul, but one who is plagued with insecurities about how I look and how I should feel.

And I’m not the only one.

How food shapes and affects our lives, and how what we eat affects our sense of identity, our self-image and feelings about ourselves, is investigated in a new Radio Four show called Food For
Thought fronted by journalist Nina Myskow.

Over tea and chocolate tart in a suite at the Ritz, comedian Joan Rivers last weekend recounted a lifetime of self-loathing and fear of being fat.

She talked about the shock of discovering she wasn’t beautiful, her mother’s advice on dinner parties and an extraordinary daily diet of vitamin pills, low-calorie ice cream sandwiches and cereal with whipped cream. It was in turns hilarious, sad and insightful.

The next one is on at 2.45pm on Sunday. Food for thought at dinner time indeed.

AM I ever going to reach ..

... that properly grown-up idea of thinking life is too short to worry about my weight?

When I’m stressed out, it’s all I seem to think about and that’s because, in this one area of my life, I can’t multi-task.

I mean that I can’t deal with my stress and watch my weight/be good because I’m too busy trying to swallow down worry. While I’m doing that, I can’t concentrate on calorie counting and exercising or whatever else I need to do to keep losing weight. Following?

When things are more in balance, it’s loads easier. Well, when I say loads I actually mean slightly, as in a little bit – totally opposite to the size of my portions during sour times.

I anticipate being stressed for four more weeks, because that’s how long I’ve got left recording a radio show for BBC Wales called What’s The Story?

I love doing it; I appreciate the opportunity, the team members are delightful company and I still can’t quite believe that me, little old me from the Rassau with a cupboard full of insecurities and dropped aitches when I speak, was asked in the first place.

But it doesn’t come without a significant level of panic because it’s recorded in front of a live audience (as opposed to a dead one I guess), it’s a fast turnaround, I’m doing it while hammers continue to pound out each of the 10 long hours of my day job, and I’m attempting to drop 76 dress sizes before my wedding next year.

So what gives? As ever, food and exercise.

Doing the show is fraught, fabulous and frantic fun and, increased stress levels excepted, one of the reasons I signed on in the first place was that it was a chance to do something which has nothing at all to do with how I look.

You don’t have to do your hair for radio, in case you hadn’t noticed, or wear a girdle. Hey, take your bra off in the studio if you want – it’s that much of a marvellously freeing medium.

Up until now, most of the non-newspaper stuff I’ve been doing has involved me talking about being fat, my struggles with weight and self-acceptance, chatting about the diets I’ve loved to hate and not lost anything on.

I have a considered and sometimes quirky view on it, and I’m often asked to share my thoughts on the obesity debate which I’m happy to do – spreading the fat as liberally as I do butter when I’m too busy to think about what I’m actually doing and take decisive action to the contrary.

So although I’m eating more because I’m frantic, I’m happier in my unease because I’m doing a project which isn’t fat related. So I’m equally cursed and blessed, an irony not lost on me or my belly.

Maybe a better woman would be able to do it all – work, successfully diet and try to be funny for the nation.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad for me. For now…

What’s The Story? is on BBC Radio Wales every Saturday at 1pm. It is recorded at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff each Thursday night prior to broadcast. Tickets are free and to be part of the audience call the box office on 029 2039 1391

It takes a big personality ...

... in more ways than one – to celebrate your lumps, bumps and belly. It takes even more unravelling to like yourself just the way you are, especially if you’re the opposite of what society deems acceptable and attractive.

But some have managed it, a few beautiful, brilliant and, yes, big souls for whom “chubby” is no barrier to success or self-confidence. They’ve managed to force their considerable talents and bountiful bits through the cracks that largely forbid obese people from getting through by the force of their will, talents and iron-willed mantra which should be doled out at school at the earliest opportunity along with the pop and crisps.

And that is: “I’m not better than you, but, even looking and feeling like I do, I’m definitely as good as.” It’s taken years for people of a different shape – and trust me, round is a shape – to break into the mainstream of pop culture, those like comic Johnny Vegas, singer Beth Ditto and Gavin and Stacey stars James Corden and Ruth Jones.

But instead of just celebrating the fact they’re amazing role models, now they’re being blamed for our obesity epidemic.

Not only have they to contend with chaffing legs, researchers are sticking two stick thin fingers up to them by saying their success causes the public to accept being overweight as normal and ignore the dangers of carrying too many pounds. The survey of over 2,000 adults was carried out for charity Nuffield Health, which offers weight loss surgery in its hospitals.

Hello, can anyone spot a clue there? They don’t get Twiggies through their door, do they!

Anyway, Professor Michael McMahon, Nuffield’s consultant said: “The increasing profile of larger celebrities such as James Corden, Ruth Jones, Eamonn Holmes and Beth Ditto means that being overweight is now perceived as being normal in the eyes of the public.

“The danger of celebrities who flaunt their weight is that viewers admire them and do not take their own weight as seriously as they should.”

Doctor, let me tell you something for nothing – I don’t know one single overweight person who hasn’t, at some time in their lives, struggled with their sense of self.

They’ve probably spent years following the dietary Holy Trinity of calorie counting, Atkins and abject misery until they said enough’s enough. I know that I have.

Speaking as someone who’s a size 24, I have spent a lifetime wishing that I didn’t have a weight “problem” or – and here’s a thing – simply had the necessary tools at my disposal to accept myself the way I am.

In May, I made a BBC documentary about this very subject called Fix My Fat Head.

It was my attempt to find out why I do what I do – and that is sometimes, not all the time, overeat for comfort and pleasure or to swallow down dissatisfaction.

I also wanted to see if I could employ different tactics to get to actually like myself as a fat person, or “person of size” as the Americans like to delicately put it. As part of that show I tried out an overeaters’ support group, an extreme dieting class, and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy sessions.

While having a go on the chair with a hypnotist to the stars, I was asked if I’d ever been called Dumbo. And she wasn’t asking about my intelligence levels there.

I’m sure well-meaning folk confuse having thick ankles with being thick-skinned. But do you know what I should have done instead?

I should have had dinner with James, Beth, Johnny and Ruth.

I should have spent time in their company, listening to them talk about their complex relationships with food, and possibly themselves. I should have taken measure of people for whom size is a state of mind, and not the measure of them as individuals.

I should have gone round to their houses, had a poke through their kitchen cupboards, and just had a bloody good laugh about this fat infused predicament of ours. At least they wouldn’t be watching how much you ate.

Tell someone they’re not quite up to the mark often enough, that they would be “better” slimmer, and only an idiot wouldn’t believe the tripe.

I’ve spent years wondering if I’d ever get to grips with myself, that authentic (thank you, Oprah) part of me that wakes up every morning and screams: “You’re great just the way you are, no matter what people say to you!”

Yet I seem to have spent my entire life on countless diets and feeling that I don’t quite measure up, especially in the boobs, waist and thighs ratio. Fat is a word that strikes fear into the heart of anyone who doesn’t know the meaning of different.

It’s the antithesis of accepted beauty, a big huge flabby blight on the landscape of normality, something which lots of us over a size 18 can’t quite get to grips with.

And that’s because we’re still largely on the cusp of acceptance. We can’t shop like the rest of you, assumptions are made about our lifestyle choices, if we go to the doctor with an eye infection it’s flippantly blamed on some form of obese germ running through every pour.

Wipe the tears of disbelief and frustration away and you spend your life over compensating for not being able to control this one anomaly by constantly trying to out-do, out-smart and out-funny the rest of the normal sized world. What we don’t need is yet another doctor denying us the bounty of brilliant, beautiful and happy role models who just happen to be a bit overweight. There are worse things to be than fat and absolutely fabulous you know.

CORNWALL ...

... two nights in St Ives for rest, relaxation, pasties and ice-cream.

What I didn’t expect was to feel exhausted and gargantuan within half hour of arriving.

First of all, the hotel was up a cliff. Well, I say cliff whereas my Significant (thin) Other called it a gentle incline. Whatever, it was enough to kill me and make me wish I’d packed lighter when all I had in my case was two pairs of knickers, a mobile phone and a KitKat, just in case there was a proliferation of fish.

Anyway, I quickly forgot about the impromptu workout once we were settled in the hotel, a Cornish paradise which didn’t give you a map and details of what time breakfast was the next morning, but a complimentary cream tea on arrival. A cream tea! For free! Blimey.

I almost forgot our bedroom was on the fourth floor while chewing, but reality soon bit me and my failing legs as we trudged slowly upstairs, with me pretending to appreciate the views at every turn in order to catch my breath.

Our room was nice, topped off with an exceptional sea view. But I guess when you’re paying £160 a night, and you’re on the fourth floor, that isn’t too much to ask.

The shower wasn’t made for big birds though, and if I’d dropped the soap it’s safe to say my bottom would have gone through the glass and possibly into Devon. I started to have a more extreme type of sweats thereafter, the kind which aren’t caused by exercise but self-induced neuroses where you think the world is conspiring against you and your bulk.

First there was the hotel’s location, then came the fourth floor room. The shower size left a lot to be desired, and the table and chairs in our swanky suite were made of trendy Italian Perspex.

As in flimsy. As in creak, creak, snap, snap potential. So I avoided them like the plague, the memory of crashing to the ground on a knackered plastic garden chair, bruising my ample pride and my enormous you know what, flashing before me.

So I went for the safe option, and I sat on the bed. What could go wrong, right? You know that creak, creak, snap, snap I mentioned earlier? Amplify that by 50. Children stopped playing. Traffic ground to a halt. Pasty fillers put down their potatoes and cheese.

For one brief moment on this glorious day, the population of St Ives looked towards the far horizon wondering where the storm was coming from.

I had broken the bed.

Imagine telling the hotel owner what had happened had I been a lithe lightweight. I’m sure, for the money we were paying, they would have been deeply apologetic. Of course, the bed then would have been at fault.

However, the conversation I had with myself as I tried to get up and see the damage was less forgiving. S(t)O got down on his knees to check under it for damage while I stood inconsolable in the corner, feeling like a fat unpopular kid in school who broke the pummel horse on the first
jump over.

He told me, in the assuaging and fat free language of love, there was a slat missing and – get this – it could have happened to anyone.

Trouble was, it happened to me. Big fat me. And nothing he could say lessened my embarrassment, especially because it happened again moments later. Yes, seriously.

The bed, he said, wasn’t put together right and didn’t have a middle support. That knowledge was of no compensation to me though, and for the rest of our break I slept uneasily on the side reinforced with our suitcases, debating if I should complain about the wonky frame and ask for a refund or at least a new room.

Next time we go away, I’ll be certain to ask if the hotel’s on the flat, if there’s a lift to all floors, if the shower is big enough to turn around in and the bed is a divan.

Of course I didn’t mention our fragile sleeping arrangements, and when it came to signing out I said we’d had a lovely time, a short break – in more ways than one – I’d remember for a long time to come.

I AM trying to convince myself ...

... that I have a bad back. More than that, pains down the left side of my leg too. Just for added conviction, you understand. Or is that self delusion? Delete as necessary.

I think I do really have twinges and I am feeling a bit stiff. But, let’s be honest here, there’s nothing much wrong with me, save a bad case of ennui.

I am in what’s commonly known to failed dieters everywhere as The Slump.

This is that awful, dark hole you find yourself trying to crawl out of when things aren’t moving fast enough for you.
It’s a basic lack of interest in yourself and the task at hand – in this case, working towards feeling better and getting fitter.

For the past few months I’ve been exercising and trying to cut down my portion sizes. Things have been going brilliantly well with my personal trainer and there aren’t words beautiful, glorious and diamond-encrusted enough to explain how magical I feel after a session with my power dresser.

We stretch, we chat, we bend, we move, we both stand in amazement and whoop a bit after I run. Yes, seriously, I run. Not outdoors, as that simply wouldn’t do, but on the dreadmill (sic).

I’m now up to 12 minute miles and can run for precisely 12 minutes 27 seconds at a time without stopping for a KitKat (anyone who’s fat and taken up exercise will tell you that every second counts when you’re measuring success).
I love the sense of achievement it has brought me, and nothing equals it – not the book deal, the TV documentary, having the best haircut going. Nothing.

And that’s because it’s way out of my comfort zone, a place where lesser mortals fear to tread.

But me being me, I can only pick holes in it. I fail to celebrate what IS and start to berate myself about what should be. It’s the cerebral fat running through the middle of me.

And so the psycho babble begins. I tell myself that two hours a week with the trainer isn’t enough. Then I move on to my eating habits, my lack of appropriate workout gear, how I should be running 13 minutes by now. I pick myself apart because I feel I don’t quite measure up.

Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t do this all the time. For the past few months I’ve coasted along nicely, buoyed with a nice sideline in healthy perspective (and seeing a bit of weight falling off my face).

But when that veneer starts to slip (read: when my trousers fail to feel slacker and I assuage the disappointment with industrial sized ham rolls), I lose sight of the big picture and all I can concentrate on is the word BIG.

So here I am, bang in the middle of The Slump. A crazy, odd place which renders me disinterested. From there rises the beast of burden that is disappointment and instead of working it out in a ball of sweat and simply feeling better about everything afterwards, I’m going to go home and do what I shouldn’t do – process it all with a processed meal.

I’ll go home and literally stare at the wall on Facebook and imagine my back’s really hurting and those pains down my leg are getting a bit more pronounced.

And I’ll pick myself up eventually and will be back on track by next Monday, hoping to start running to stop myself standing still yet again.

There is nothing “gentle” ...

... about telling someone that they need to lose weight. Put the goodie two shoes medical stuff aside for a minute, please, and hearing the words “slim down or ship out” has got to hurt. And that doesn’t matter who you are in life’s colourful tapestry. Nobody should confuse having thick ankles with being thick skinned.

We appear to be living in a society where the worst five words in the world seem to be “S***, you’ve put on weight”, where everyone actually dreams of hearing “Wow…. What diet are YOU on“ or “You look so fabulous, you really MUST give me the name of your bariatric surgeon”.

What you don’t expect is someone like Oprah Winfrey who, unlike Fern Briton, has showed the world every single one of her emotional and physical stretchmarks, to kowtow to those who think they know better.

But that, apparently, is exactly what the queen of unconventional did when US Vogue editor Anna Wintour told the talk show host to drop 20 pounds to be on the cover of the fashion magazine back in 1998.

The severly fringed and obviously viper tongued one revealed that is what she said during an unaired segment from her 60 Minutes interview recently shown in the States.

"It was a very gentle suggestion," she said, laughing (the cheek!). "I went to Chicago to visit Oprah, and I suggested that it might be an idea that she lose a little bit of weight."

Oh, an IDEA. Right…. as if one on this every subject hadn’t popped into Oprah’s mind before!

She added: "I said simply that you might feel more comfortable. She was a trooper!"

Oprah, 55, must have listened to the fashion legend, who deals with style and trades on women’s insecurities by offering up images of dreams we can’t even aspire to let alone achieve. Perfection costs, and you can’t pay for it in the currency of carbs sadly.

Anyway, Oprah was featured on the cover from more than 10 years ago with the tagline: "Oprah! A Major Movie, An Amazing Makeover” in order to sell her film, Beloved.

“She totally welcomed the idea, and she went on a very stringent diet," Wintour said. "And it was one of our most successful covers ever."

It’s amazing to me that Winfrey has pockets so deep could purchase Vogue if she wanted to, yet to get on the cover, she had to make a deal with the devil, even if she was wearing Prada and offering to dress you in designer gear from head to toe.

I’m not sure what is more surprising here, Oprah losing the weight for Wintour or Wintour suggesting to someone of her stature that she didn’t quite measure up in the beauty stakes, which in effect precluded her from beatific greatness as defined by her.

Note I didn’t say smart enough, famous enough, rich enough. She simply was too big.

A decade on, and I’d like to think that Oprah has learned her lesson and wouldn’t slim for anyone, but herself. And she’d tell Wintour to rearrange the words “stick”, “skinny“ “Vogue”. “a***” and advise her to make sure she makes a meal out of the asterisks.

I love Sophie Dahl.

Maybe it’s because she shares a first name with my mother, or something to do with the fact her cheeks look like two apples. Then again, I’m also partial to lentils in a curry.

She was also fat and famed for her “curves”, so you’ve got to applaud her for that I guess.

I think you forget that she wasn’t massive though, a real, proper fat girl. The way the Press banged on about her, as being a plus size model, a cheerleader for the Rubens-esque among us, you’d think she was a right lumper.

She was, in fact, about a size 16 at her biggest, but it’s more likely she was a 14. Standing at an enviable 5ft 10in and with boobs up to her Granny Smiths, she was certainly formidable, someone who looked like she happily indulged in whatever she wanted.

Then she got thin. Thin as in curveless, ramrod, lanky, bloody lucky. And the world seemed to turn on her wondering where it all went wrong, or at least where her belly went.

On the one side you had the pear-shaped gals wondering why our queen stopped celebrating her ample backside, all of us biting down on our disappointment that one of the sisterhood had gone over to the light side; then there were those who just wanted to know what was in the Dahl Diet so they could follow it to the letter and be just like Soph.

So how then did she do it? And why?

It turns out, our girl has always had a complicated relationship with food. But unlike the mere mortals among us who don’t quite work out the kinks by cutting out the carbohydrates, she managed to figure it all out for herself.

And, just like magic, or like the time she went away and stuffed herself stupid only to find that her jeans were looser, her stomach flatter and half her bottom was still languishing at a five star retreat in Mexico, she became “normal”. No longer did she need to crack jokes about declaring her arse as excess baggage.

In her new cookery book, which is also part slimming confessional, she puts it like this: “I have always had a passionate relationship with food: passionate in that I loved it blindly or saw it as its own entity, rife with problems. Back in the old days food was either a faithful friend or a sin, rarely anything in between... I was the big model. I was meant to eat, a lot. It gave other people hope and cheered them as they enjoyed their chocolate. It was a clumsy way of thinking.”

To cut a long story short, in Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights, there’s no big reveal about how she lost weight but a series of what she calls “mini epiphanies”: love splits, moving house, losing work, finding work, loss, illness and the general mash-up of living.

Dahl writes: “To everything there is a season; from 17 to 21 mine was the season of chocolate cake. I didn’t know how to eat within the boundaries of reason; instead I learned loudly through trial and error. My unsure baby fat, for that’s what it was really, slunk slowly away one year. Its departure

left me to my adult self and the slow joy I get from food and cooking is something I cannot imagine being without.”

Hers is a lovely book, due in no small part to the way she weaves her thoughts about herself and her charmed life into a sticky, beautiful jumble that’s straight out of the Malory Towers of her mind.

Yet for all her humanity about eating well, body image and the delight she takes in feeding her friends, Sophie’s world reads like an unfamiliar glossy smorgasbord of things whole and hearty, sweet and dainty.

Her BFG namesake ate snozzcumber, but Soph has a more refined palate.

Her childhood wasn’t filled with tomato sauce sandwiches and frozen Arctic Roll, or chicken and chips in a basket like mine. You’d expect nothing less than one where every one of her relatives was born knowing how to make Victoria sponge and vanilla custard; her adult culinary life is more about throwing together scrumpdiddleumptious chargrilled scallops on pea puree or chicken and fennel au gratin than only having the energy to warm up a couple of cheese and onion pasties after work and then hate yourself for it. If Ms Dahl was writing this, I’m sure she would sum up her ethos by reminding us of her book’s subtle: The Art Of Eating A Little Of What You Fancy (HarperCollins, £18.99).

So does she have a weakness that brings her down from her posh perch and back into the land of the indigent indulgent?

White bread slathered with butter and Marmite, followed by salt and vinegar crisps.

Nice to see Dahlicious is human after all.