Shelley Bovey can never eat normally again. Having bounced from one diet to another without pause for almost four decades, even the slightest binge over Christmas would have added a disproportionate number of pounds to her weight that would have taken many weeks to shed.
At her heaviest, Bovey weighed 20 stone. Now, at 5ft 2in and 13 stone, she is still officially around four stone overweight but she knows her metabolism is so wrecked by the years of yo-yo dieting that she will never reach her target weight.
'Maintaining my weight now is almost as difficult as losing it,' she said. 'I will never be able to eat what a normal person can because of the dieting booby prize: the more weight you lose the fewer calories you need, so you must constantly reduce your intake. I will always have to adjust and compensate. I will never be able to take my eye off this particular ball.'
Last week Britons officially became the fattest nation in Europe: according to Weight Concern, more than a million British children under 16 are obese, that is, more than 20 per cent over their optimum body weight, while more than half of all adults in the UK are officially overweight.
The cost of healthcare for the seriously overweight drains the NHS of more than £500 million a year and costs society almost £2 billion in lost work time and economic output. Obesity may cause cancer, increases the risk of heart disease and is widely thought to cause diabetes.
The condition is one of the largest and fastest-growing epidemics in the Western world: since 1980 obesity has risen from 8 per cent to 17 per cent while in the past year alone in the UK, the figure grew by a further 2 per cent.
Unless something changes dramatically, within 12 years Britain will have caught up with America, where more than a quarter of the population is overweight and obesity kills more than 280,000 people a year. By 2030 it is estimated that the US figure will have risen to 50 per cent, with Britain still hot on its trail.
Bovey knows that obesity, like alcoholism, is a condition from which she will always be in recovery. But what makes her and other dieting experts furious is their belief that the problem is created and artificially maintained by the dieting industry.
'Very few people would be obese if we didn't have such an emphasis on being thin,' said Susie Orbach, psychotherapist to Princess Diana and author of the seminal 1978 tract, Fat Is a Feminist Issue , a new bite-size version of which, On Eating , is published this week.
'It's not far-fetched at all to say that the situation we are facing today, where people are dangerously confused about their relationship with food and with their own bodies, has been cynically manipulated by a food industry which cares only about its bank balance,' she added. 'People no longer understand the needs of their own bodies - the ideal situation for a food industry which can then sell us whatever benefits them. We have become the industry's prey.'
The dieting industry has never been so sophisticated, so aggressive or so popular. Nor has it ever been so rich. More than 800 new diet books weighed down bookshop shelves this Christmas, membership of health clubs leapt by an average of 50 per cent in the new year, and supermarket sales of low-fat products grew by more than £300 million in the past five years.
Overall, the 'wellbeing sector' - which includes organic products and vitamin and mineral supplements as well as beauty products and health and fitness - has soared by 60 per cent in the past five years, faster than any other retail sector. Spending on gym membership and health and fitness treatments broke the £2 billion barrier last year and will exceed £2.5 billion by 2005, according to figures from the independent retail analyst Datamonitor.
But the diets, exercises, potions, lotions and pills are not working. According to the National Obesity Forum, 95 per cent of all weight loss due to diets is regained, most of it within a single year, while for every 10lb of lean muscle lost on a crash diet, 12lb is put back on - much of it in fat - because the body is still operating in famine mode.
Dieting has gone from being a female preoccupation to a national obsession shared by men and children alike: one in 20 men buys over-the-counter slimming pills each month; most four-year-olds know what the word 'diet' means; at the age of eight, many children are already on one.
'As long as there is anxiety around food, people will fall for these dieting tricks, and when they fail, which they almost always do, they blame themselves rather than the diet,' said Katherine Szrodecki, who is Britain's leading campaigner for 'size accept ance'. She added: 'The overweight person's self-image as a failure is thus created and perpetuated.'
Those who have failed to maintain a diet that has been promoted as being simple and flawless find it increasingly difficult to trust themselves, said Szrodecki. 'In this way, those desperate to lose weight become more vulnerable to an aggressive and deceptive dieting industry and more likely to believe whatever quick fixes it offers, however dangerous and unhealthy they may be,' she added.
As the anxieties of parents filter down to their children, society's hatred of fat people becomes ever more vehement, creating a circle of distain where confidence-sapping, anti-fat discrimination is an everyday reality. 'Discrimination against fat people is particularly pernicious because the overweight have few advocates,' said Bovey, pointing out that employment, medical treatment and even admission to further education is often denied to overweight people.
'I've been told more than once that I will not get promoted unless I lose weight, I've been threatened with untold health problems and been told since I was 15 that no one will ever find me attractive,' she said. 'Most fat people are already unhappy enough; this kind of hatred makes it impossible to find the self-confidence to even broach the terribly difficult battle to lose weight.'
Fed up with overweight people allowing themselves to be treated as victims, Janice Bhend, founder of Yes, the magazine dedicated to size-acceptance, advocates rejecting the food and dieting industry.
'Yes, the industry is foul but at the end of the day people do it to themselves,' she said. 'At some stage in our lives, we have to decide: am I going to continue in this cycle of desperation, living a life of constant deprivation, or am I going to decide to be happy with myself as I am? What fat people need to do is stop behaving like victims.'
'Eating is like any other bodily function,' Orbach says. 'Wait until you're hungry and then put the most delicious thing you can find into your mouth.'
Enjoy and relish every mouthful and then stop eating when you are full, Orbach advises. It really can be that simple.
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