I was six when I started my first diet. It was a modest effort, mainly because I had no control over what was given to me to eat for my breakfast, lunch or tea. But I could refuse sweets and second helpings, and that is what I did. I don’t remember if I lost any weight – I’m not sure I even knew what scales were at the time – but I knew that refusing food and not getting fat were both good things to do and, usefully, connected.

I must have had one of those neurotic, ever fad-dieting mothers, you may be thinking, to have started so young. Not at all. My mother was as robust and sensible around food as she was around everything else (my father, for the avoidance of doubt, likewise – there was never any pressure around anything from him).

I was simply a girl child growing up in the eighties surrounded by Jane Fonda’s workout videos, Weight Watchers adverts, Rosemary Conley’s hip-and thigh-specific exhortations, the Green Goddess and endless recommendations to shift those “stubborn pounds” (for a long time I thought that was one word, so rarely did I hear them described any other way) by consuming only grapefruit, or cottage cheese, or cabbage, or boiled eggs.

To be thin was to........

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