London - As a big girl in a world which has always wanted me to be thin, I know all about fat shaming.
It is a relatively new term, yet it describes an age-old attitude to those of us to whom the size-10 rail at Topshop might as well be the tip of Mount Kilimanjaro; to people who, for whatever reason, fail to keep their size in check.
It stems from the belief that we are fat because we are weak-willed, slovenly and very possibly subnormal. Like naughty puppies who do their business where they ought not to, we must be punished by having our noses rubbed in it until we learn the error of our ways.
There’s just one problem: it doesn’t work. Not the puppy thing (although, actually, that doesn’t work either) but the being mean to fatties in the hope they will lose weight.
A team at University College London has found that people who are made to feel ashamed about their size are six times as likely to overeat as a result. Far from encouraging them to lose weight, being criticised simply drives them to comfort-eat more.
Without wishing to denigrate the work of the good scientists at UCL, I could have told them that for nothing. All my life people have been telling me to lose weight. And all my life it has only made me want to eat more.
It started as a teenager. I’d been a skinny child so, when I began to put on weight, there was concern. No one in my family is fat. We have many other faults - drunkenness, promiscuity, greed - but never obesity. It was most unexpected.
At first, my pudge was tolerated. There was a feeling that I’d grow out of it, that it was just a phase. Then - and I can’t quite remember when - it became A Thing.
It didn’t help, of course, that my mother was as thin as a whippet and a more beautiful version of Anjelica Huston.
At dinner time I would reach for seconds and there would be a certain amount of throat-clearing. Did I really think another potato was wise? Wouldn’t I prefer some green beans instead? Or perhaps just a glass of water to fill me up?
If people offered me food, it would be refused on my behalf. At one point, a weight-loss self-hypnosis tape mysteriously appeared in my cassette player. Someone was clearly trying to communicate a message: I was overweight and I needed to do something about it.
But instead of jolting me into action, all this heavy hinting just served to entrench my eating. For the first time in my life, I began to steal food. I was hungry, see. Hungry for the unconditional love that only a slice of hot buttered toast with Marmite can offer.
I became an expert stealth-eater. (I still am: I can walk past a table of canapés and hoover up half of them before most people have had a chance to take off their coat.) I began to associate eating with a furtive kind of pleasure.
I carried on putting on weight and, before long, I was the same dress size as my age - 14. No one could understand why: all the snacks were under lock and key, and mealtimes were closely monitored. But the reason was simple: the more they tried to get me to diet, the hungrier - and more cunning - I became.
I started hanging out at friends’ houses in the hope of scoring some food. Italian houses (I grew up in Italy) are full of food. Lovely, delicious, generous quantities of guilt-free food - quite a lot of it pasta-related. While at home food was rationed; here it was freely on offer.
I quickly learnt to binge. What I couldn’t eat, I hid - to be enjoyed later in the privacy of our bathroom (that being the only room in the house that had a lock on the door). Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten mushroom tagliatelle out of the sink.
Of course, my family were only trying to help. They wanted the best for me and, for them, the best meant looking gloriously lean and lovely on the beach. They’d say things like, “You’d be really pretty if you lost a couple of stone.” And they were probably right. But that knowledge only made me feel more sad, which made me even hungrier.
One Christmas - I remember it as clear as day - I ate an entire bag of mini Mars bars. When this was discovered, I was in so much trouble that I was banished to my room for Christmas dinner, like a naughty fat Labrador. Not only was I greedy, I was now also morally reprehensible. After all, what kind of person ruins Christmas?
Throughout my teens, this idea became firmly entrenched. Thin people are good and virtuous, useful and productive members of society; fat people are spineless parasites. That is why, when I put on weight, I am consumed by self-loathing. When I am thin (or something approximating thin), by contrast I could conquer the world.
People’s responses only served to reinforce this notion. If I dropped half a stone, friends and family would congratulate me and lionise me. Once, I was treated to a shiny new wardrobe - from Benetton, in those days the height of sophistication - purely thanks to my ability to fit into a size 12. The message was clear: being thin and being loved were, if not exactly the same thing, then very much in neighbouring ballparks.
All of which is a very long-winded and rather self-centred way of saying that losing weight is not as simple as eating less. No matter what people like Katie Hopkins - the TV personality and former Apprentice star, who has deliberately piled on four stone in a bid to show fat people like me that shedding the weight is just a question of willpower and discipline - might think.
Because, in the majority of cases, being overweight is not a symptom of moral lassitude, laziness or just sheer piggery; it’s a symptom of a deep-rooted psychological problem.
My own theory - for what it’s worth - is that fat people are depressed. When the mind is healthy, it simply doesn’t tell the body to overeat. Essentially, fat people are people who, instead of turning to alcohol, cigarettes or drugs to cope with their troubles, self-medicate with food.
There are no end of lavishly funded programmes to help people who abuse alcohol or drugs. Armies of doctors and nurses and counsellors with sympathetic nods and understanding smiles and government-funded budgets. Smokers can get patches and help on the NHS. Drink and drug addicts get taxpayer-funded rehab, NA and AA.
Crucially, all these highly addictive and physically destructive substances are in some way controlled, either in the form of taxation or by the law. Sugar, by contrast (which studies have found lights up the same area of the human brain as cocaine, only more so), is freely and cheaply available to everyone.
So what kind of help do fat people get? Humiliation and mockery and harridans like Hopkins treating them with utter contempt and scorn and turning their condition into a reality TV show and, no doubt, a lucrative book and DVD deal.
Of course Hopkins is not going to struggle to get back into her size 8 dresses. The woman has the sensitivity of Genghis Khan combined with the modesty of Emperor Napoleon. She may well have psychological problems, but they’re not because of her self-loathing.
Fat people get doctors like the one who, when I was first diagnosed with an underactive thyroid, made me strip to my pants and pinched my tummy before telling me to restrict myself to 1 200 calories a day for the rest of my life. I was 28 at the time.
And we get a food industry that is free to peddle the high-sugar, high-calorie, high-carbohydrate diet, which is the architect of our destruction, at rock-bottom prices.
For someone who struggles with emotional eating, the corner-shop sweet counter is the equivalent to handing an alcoholic the keys to the cellar.
Nine out of ten fat people don’t want to be fat. Just as most drunks would rather be sober and most drug addicts clean. They need help, not humiliation; sympathy, not aggression; and, yes, a bit of help from society to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Above all, they need to reset their relationship with food. That means learning to see it once again as fuel, and not as comfort or a place of refuge from all those cruel and counterproductive jibes.
All of which would be an awful lot easier if people would be a little more understanding. - Daily Mail