I was nine years old when I realised there was more to food than food. Food represented something about the way you saw yourself and others saw you. In every sense, you were what you ate - or didn't eat. I was in hospital, being investigated for a long-term illness. The doctors didn't believe I was ill. They thought I was a school-dodging malingerer and gave me funny looks. The longer they investigated me, the more they gave me those funny looks.

I had been a well-built lad. Tubby, you could say. Loved my cakes, fish and chips, crisps and chocolate. Until I woke up one day with a sore throat and a blinding headache, and feeling sick. So I didn't eat because it only made me feel more sick. After a month or so, I still wouldn't eat - not so much because I felt sick but because this was proof that I was poorly. The healthy me would stuff himself all day long, so the sick me wouldn't eat a thing.

Eight stone quickly became seven and then six. The skinnier I became the more beautiful I looked in my mirror. Eventually, I was four-and-a-half stone of skin and bone and bloated tummy. I looked in the mirror and couldn't believe how gorgeous I was. I had no bottom, no wrists, no muscles, and every stripe of my multicoloured jumper matched a jutting rib.

No one called it anorexia 30 years ago - not even if you were a girl, let alone a boy. The nurses woke in the middle of the night to pour banana Complan down my throat, which I puked up. I hid food, poured it down the loo, passed it on to kids sharing the ward.

Gradually, as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years, I started eating again. My mum and dad were delighted as my weight crept up. I was devastated. Back up to six stone, I felt fat and ugly. Weight became a measure of how much better I was getting and how quickly. And if you've been ill for years, cocooned in a bedroom or hospital ward, the thought of getting better is the most frightening thing in the world.

But I did get better, and one of the things for which I was eternally grateful to my illness was my skinnyness. Throughout my teens I could eat what I wanted without putting on weight. I was back on the fish and chips, cakes and chocolate, just like when I was a kid; the only difference now was that I could take it. So I stopped worrying about food. When I heard of women who were anorexic, I was interested because I knew we shared something. I talked about it in the past tense because it was an old problem suffered by the old me. A character blip brought on by illness.

But now I'm not so sure. In the past few years I've become concerned with weight again, but this time it's different. I've changed and the world has changed. I'm in my late 30s, my metabolism is slowing down, love handles and a paunch have visited for the first time. Only natural, hey? Just like my dad's generation and his dad's before that. Which is the problem. The paunch and love handles are no longer the norm for my generation - or at least not the norm in terms of what we see in mags and on telly. Nowadays, the norm is David Beckham and Robbie Williams stripped off to their six pack, or the man in the advert whose body is so perfect that the beautiful woman has to lick the ice cream off it. Today, it's not just athletes and pop stars who have to fulfil the phwoaah! factor. Go into any number of pubs, restaurants and gyms, and it's pretty obvious that men have been employed for their looks. Not that we complain. Men have employed women on the same basis for ever.

The first time I noticed my belly I went into denial. For months I was convinced I had stomach cancer. Perhaps it was arrogance. I can't have a paunch, I'm not that kind of person! Then there was the time on a beach when my friend looked at my trunks and my overhang, and said, "Cor! You're all man aren't you!" At first I thought it was a compliment. And then I realised. Bastard. Fattist bastard.

It took about a year to accept that it wasn't cancer. I got on the scales, and they shrieked 13 stone at me. I was distraught: here we were in the 21st century and you still couldn't get a decent pair of scales. I shook them, moved them round the bathroom to somewhere lighter, cheated them down to just below the zero mark, went to my neighbours' house to weigh myself, took every single item of clothing off - 12:12 it said.

I decided to get fit - football, running, tennis. But that led to another problem - new muscles, extra weight. So it was down to simple dieting, old style. And this is where nothing had changed. I think I was typically male - I wanted to lose weight, wanted to look good, but like so many boy-men didn't have a clue what to do. So I gave up breakfast and slapped myself on the back. Gave up lunch and gave myself an extra slap. Sometimes I didn't even have tea, and I thought this was the ultimate in healthy living.

By midnight I'd be starving. But I'd be so chuffed with my self-control that I'd give myself a little treat. So I made myself a curry. And some chocolate pudding. And a couple of packets of crisps. And a pot of coffee. And it's pointless having a pot of coffee if you've got no choccies to complement them. And the funny thing was that by the time I'd finished the coffee I felt so alive and kicking that I'd sit down to watch the early-morning telly with a plate of cheese and biscuits. I didn't lose weight.

In the past few months, I've started to get my act together. I occasionally dabble in fruit for breakfast, try to eat regularly through the day, restrict myself to a cereal (well, a cereal and bar chocolate) at midnight, and have stopped weighing myself every day. I think it may be working. The other day I looked in the mirror, and I knew, just knew, that I was thinner than last time. My stomach certainly wasn't flat, but it was flatter. I looked again. Somehow the belly of substance now looked insipid and wimpy. I thought about the famous actress who told me that she loved her man for his paunch and had never ever loved anyone for their flat belly. I looked in the mirror again, and wasn't pleased with what I saw. Skinny bastard.