At first, the fluctuations were minor. In my teens, I
veered from slim to slightly plump and back again. In my twenties, I
went from slim to plump to podgy, and repeated the process. When I
turned 30, I made a gargantuan effort to lose weight, and was slim for
two years.
But then something happened; I lost control again, and my
weight exploded. I was plump in no time, then frankly fat. It was
horrible. And something, I knew, didn't quite make sense.
Of course, on one level, it made perfect sense. I was fat
because I was greedy, or lazy, or both. To get technical, I was fat
because I had disturbed my "calorie balance" - I had been consuming more
calories than I'd been expending.
Conversely, when I lost weight, I had successfully reversed
the process. But why, when I got fat again, was I always fatter than
I'd been the time before? And why, when I got slimmer, was I never as
slim as I'd been the time before?
In early 2003, I weighed about 240lb - at just over six feet tall, this made me close to obese.
I was, I could see, taking a similar trajectory, and at the
same time, as Kirstie Alley, Sam Malone's love interest, Rebecca, in
Cheers, who had been slim, and then plumpish, and was now gaining girth
at a huge rate.
I wondered if there was any way back for Alley. There
certainly didn't seem to be for other celebrities, such as Robbie
Coltrane, Dawn French and Johnny Vegas. Were they stuck? Was I?
There comes a point when you lose heart - when a diet seems
like the only answer. But could it be that dieting had made me fatter?
Or, at the very least, that it had been a contributing factor?
According to research published by scientists from the University of California this week, the answer is: absolutely.
The Californian team analysed more than 30 studies of diets;
one study found that a group of dieters ended up fatter than a control
group who hadn't restricted their food at all.
One of the researchers, Dr Traci Mann, says: "You can
initially lose 5-10 per cent of your weight on any number of diets. But
after this honeymoon period, the weight comes back."
Over the years, I have tried just about every diet I could
find. I started in the 1970s; low-carb diets had been popular, but
low-fat was making a comeback. For a while, I trimmed fat off my steaks,
and removed skin from chicken legs. I felt perky and trim.
Later, I did the F-Plan diet, which involves eating loads of
fibre (it fills you up, but passes right through.)
Later still, I did
the Hay diet, in which you avoid mixing carbohydrates and proteins.
Each diet seemed to be a trick to get you to consume fewer
calories. And each diet worked - for a time. It felt great, to be fixing
myself. And so quickly! But the overall problem was getting worse and
worse.
There was a pattern - the process of getting fat was
governed by a stronger force than the process of getting slim. Thinking
about this, I remembered a book with the improbable title of Dieting
Makes You Fat, written by Geoffrey Cannon and Hetty Einzig in 1983.
I'd flicked through this book in a bookshop during a slim
period, and, for the 15 or 20 minutes I spent with the text, it seemed
to make perfect sense. But it didn't stop me dieting.
When you begin a diet, you're never quite in your right
mind. You feel fat, ashamed, desperate, and guilty. In this state of
mind, punitive self-deprivation seems like a good remedy.
Years later, I read the book again, and again it made sense.
"Dieting," said Cannon and Einzig, "creates the conditions it is meant
to cure." When you diet, something funny happens to your metabolism - it
gets better. Better, that is, at making you fat. To see why this should
be the case, you have to think like a Darwinian.
Genetically, we are, to all intents and purposes, exactly
the same as our Stone Age ancestors, who were threatened, above all, by
starvation.
To survive, and reproduce, they had to have a metabolic
system that would enable them to deal with periods of scarcity. And we,
of course, are the same. Except we don't have periods of scarcity - we
have diets.
What happens when the body is given less food than it needs?
In the short term, it lives off its own reserves of fat. It gets
thinner. But another mechanism comes into play: it also gets better at
getting fat. When you diet, your mind wants to lose weight, but your
body does not. When you diet, your body thinks you are unable to find
food. You think: diet. Your body thinks: famine.
In the Stone Age, your fat-packing genes made you better at
both survival and reproduction. Now, in this time of great abundance,
they make you worse at both - more prone to heart attacks, and less
attractive to the opposite sex.
And crucially, the more diets you go on - the more famines
your body is exposed to, in other words - the better you become at
getting fat.
What had happened to me, across the decades of dieting, was that I had developed a talent for getting fat.
Thinking about this in 2003, at my fattest, it all seemed
logical. But still, I wasn't done with dieting. I decided to eat lots of
protein and green vegetables, and cut down on carbs and sugar.
I thought I'd found the answer. I stopped eating pies,
croissants, bagels, cakes and chocolates. Instead, I ate fish, chicken,
steak and vegetables.
Did I lose weight? Sure. But then something weird happened.
I started drinking heavily. Pretty soon, alcohol had replaced food as
my big problem.
I thought I'd been unhappy because I was fat. It turned out
that I'd got fat because I was unhappy. And now I was drunk for the
same reason.
In the end, there are two important truths about diets. The
first is that they can never work in the long term, which means that
they can never work.
If you restrict calories, you'll just get better at getting
fat. If you restrict unhealthy foods, and never eat them again, you
might lose weight. But losing weight probably won't cure your real
problems.
Just look at some people who have successfully lost weight:
Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Victoria Beckham. Have they dealt with
their real problems?
The other big truth about diets is this: they are hugely
attractive because, on a diet, you don't have to confront your problems.
On one level, I love diets. I can't help myself. Neither can Kirstie. Just look at her now.
• 'The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict', by William Leith, is published by Bloomsbury, price £5.91.
The video looks very cheap and at the beginning with the
white background and her straining her voice and I don't know if she is trying
to prove she can sing but it wasn't good. At all. Then the actual song came on
and it was plain, Lots of lights, the main guy as the DJ, breakdancers and then
main male dancers. Then her posing and attempting to dance. It was unoriginal,
recycled and boring video. From Unbreak my heart which was a classic and
beautiful video to this horrid mess. Toni really.
Anyways, what made it worse was that stupid hat thing that
she wore in a scene. That was just the end of it because how many people have
that and their trying to be fierce or whatever it's over used, she could have
worn a bin back and I would have been more amazed than that thing on her head.
Rant over, lool. Ermm, I think the only positive about that
video was the guy....He was hot!!!!! Like, if I saw the video again it would be
for him and that's it. 
