…for every pound in weight I’ve lost over the years I could probably give Bill Gates a run for his money. I can’t remember the first diet I ever went on, but I do remember the moment it occurred to me that I didn’t have the same kind of Bambi limbs as most of the other girls at school.

It was sometime around top class in infants, when we were doing a topic about farms – I even remember the teacher who first alerted me to the fact that I was a porker under construction, she was called Miss Baume, and I remember her looking like an extra from The Liver Birds. She called me and another fairly chunky little girl out to the front of the class, and waving her arm in our direction announced that the two of us together probably weighed the same as an adult pig.

Yes, I’m serious, she really did that. I was 7 years old and the utter humiliation of that moment was the first time I recall feeling ashamed of the way I looked. I mean AS IF you would ever, ever, ever say that? I ran home after school in tears and my mum gave me a kit kat to make me feel better.

Fast forward a few years, to around the time that the film Grease came out in 1978. I was 13 at the time, and having watched the film at least 10 times and spent god knows how many weeks coveting a pair of shiny black leggings, (which were obviously going to transform me in the same way they’d transformed Sandy), I nagged my poor mum half to death. She clearly knew this purchase had disaster written all over it but eventually I wore her down – leggings duly purchased, I was very very pissed off when they didn’t in fact make me look like Sandy at all.

I’m still not sure whether it was because my legs were a foot shorter than hers, or because my arse was at least a foot wider – it might even have been down to the fact that the only thing I had to team them with was a pair of sensible Clarks’ sandals and a poncho (stop laughing, ponchos were all the rage at the time).

But if my memory serves me right, the school disco didn’t end with me making sweet music with the year nine stud muffin. Or even the year 9 munter to be fair…I think what was in those pants on that night scared all of us, and there are several people who probably still have a phobia of lycra to this day.

Things could only get better from there, right?

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