One of my favourite lines from Absolutely Fabulous - that cheerful sitcom of smoking, drinking and drug-taking women - came in an episode in which the main character, Edina, decides to lose weight. To her daughter Saffy's suggestion "Look, mum. All you've got to do is eat less and take a bit of exercise," Edina shoots back, quick as a whip, "Sweetie, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it".
Plenty of people share Edina's suspicion that there must be some big diet secret - that the whole enterprise hangs on cutting out carbs, eating oranges before each meal, or struggling to stand on a piece of revolving machinery while it magically shakes the pounds off you. And there are almost as many people prepared to exploit these suspicions. The diet industry is always described in vast numbers - it's apparently worth at least £1bn a year, for instance - yet I never understood just how massive it is until I started this column.
Since declaring my wish to lose weight, I've been approached with quick fixes galore. What has really made me laugh is how many emails have started "of course, we all know that diets don't work" before describing yet another faddish and/or painful addition to the dieting spectrum. I have been offered hypnotherapy, seven-day detoxes, 12-day detoxes, I have been pushed to go on diets that involve eating nothing but vegetables for the first three weeks. I have been sent messages that read "lie one [sic] your back and loose [sic] weight!" before describing a "bikini treatment" that involves "specially developed electronic wave shapes" being sent through my body.
I've been recommended yoga gurus whose clients include "affluent Sloanies" - just about the least effective marketing pitch I've ever heard. I've been advised to try a form of pilates-meets-circuit training, which is apparently practised by Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Hurley, and that bloke from Entourage who says "hug it out, bitch" in every second sentence. I've been invited to visit a "holistic detox retreat" which offers juice fasting and colon cleansing. Apparently "many people carry a huge amount of weight in their colon due to old impacted faeces [Oh. My. God!] which is removed during the detox process. Clients sometimes lose as much as a stone in a week".
And while I know I'm meant to be excited by the idea of losing a stone in a week, the truth is that that's my worst nightmare - whether it involves my colon being hosed out, or not. Lose a stone in a week, and you can pretty much guarantee you'll put on a stone and a half the next week. I remember that from the time, aged 14, when I ate nothing but apples and potatoes for seven days before gorging on chocolate sponge.
The ease of re-gaining weight is what makes losing it potentially so depressing - the recidivism rate for most well-known diets is, frankly, unspeakable. I was musing on this a few days ago, on my hour-long walk to work, when it suddenly occurred to me, to the raising of my own eyebrows, that I know loads of people who have lost weight and kept it off. One of my closest male friends was 19 stone, lost seven of them, and has stayed that way for the best part of 10 years. A friend lost three stone, and has kept it off for five years. A relative lost two stone and has kept it off for four years.
It also occurred to me that not a single one of these people had lost weight as a result of any plan devised by the diet industry - most of them relied on nothing but common sense, and perhaps an information sheet from the doctor. Have you ever met anyone personally who's said "Oh, that diet where you eat nothing but grapefruits? Yep, I did that a decade back, lost loads of weight, and kept it all off"? Me neither. You may actually have met plenty of people though who have simply done what Saffy advised, and lost and kept weight off for decades. These people's stories don't get heard very loudly, because there is no trick, and therefore nothing to sell. But the secret is - they are out there.
