Dieting is just like marrying Elizabeth Taylor. Both endeavours are doomed to certain failure, yet everybody embarks on them thinking: "With me, it's going to be different. With me, it's going to work." They are invariably wrong. Liz is still single and I bet you're still fat (or rather, and crucially – since fat is more often than not a state of mind – think of yourself as fat). Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat. (That's a "fat fact", by the way.)
The diet industry in the UK alone is worth £2bn – not bad for a business wholly reliant on failure. But don't be downhearted: be defiant and don't diet. If this new year finds you signing up to yet another overpriced gym membership and resolving, this time, to really get to grips with your muffin top tum, then don't – because you won't. Under no circumstances set yourself up for failure: you'll only end up feeling worse.
I should know. In the 20 long, hungry years between my late teens and late 30s I bought in to virtually every new diet and/or exercise regime that hoved into view, particularly at this most vulnerable time for those of us prone to poor body image – a new year. The F-plan, the Food Combining, the Atkins, the G-Force, the Never Eat in the Nude (OK, I made that one up) – every diet under the sun, I've tried them all and guess what: I'm no thinner, nor indeed fatter, than I've ever been.
Lest I sound pleased with myself, it's not that; it's more that I've learned to accept reality, which is that I was never going to be a size 10. And the reality is that the vast majority of us are predisposed to be a certain weight, and only drastic measures – such as not eating very much at all – can alter that.
However, don't slump into a slough of despond – au contraire, simply learn to interpret facts; fashion them, if you like, to your advantage. For example, that pesky recommendation that women have "no more than 14 units of alcohol a week": well, considering there are only nine units in one bottle of wine, obviously that advice positively demands interpretation.
To that end why not take a leaf out of my little sister's book. Christina likes a drink as much as the next overstretched, under-appreciated working mother, and is not about to be cowed by government guidelines, oh no. She has decided that the figure they've landed on cannot possibly apply to her – a privileged individual whose parents lived into their 80s and who works out regularly and eats well, and sensibly. Having managed to wrestle her GP into admitting that the recommendation was a sort of catchall, she's sat firmly on guilt and self-doubt and set her own limits (well, I say limits).
And that's how you should approach self-improvement, if improvement is how you must see it, in the new year: calibrate the information given for all specifically to your needs. If you really think you need to look like Elizabeth Hurley, then eat nothing, work out all day and book yourself in for a shed-load of surgery on an annual basis. If, however, you have richer pursuits in mind and know that no woman should be judged by how she looks – that everything she brings to the party is more important than the size of her arse – then refuse to be sucked into the never ending whirligig of self-doubting, self-hating madness that is stop-start dieting and crazy new exercise regimes.
They used to say "you can never be too rich or too thin" – I think many of today's front-cover celebrities have safely blown that maxim out of the water. Every moment you find yourself wondering if some new diet has the answer, just remember you might as well flush the price of that book down the loo.
