Part of the problem is that calories are everywhere, beckoning, beguiling. There’s the cheap alcohol, the nightly bottle of Shiraz. The coffee and croissant culture. The explosive portion sizes. We’re short of time, so we drive rather than walk. We’re short of expertise, so our evenings are punctuated by the ping of the microwave. We eat on the go, we multi-task during meals, picking up something or other and shovelling it in at the traffic lights (consider the dispiriting thought that more Americans eat lunch in the car than in a restaurant). Food is everywhere, and if it’s not food profusion, it’s food porn, turning our humble daily bread into something to worship which costs eight quid at an artisan deli. No wonder we’re overwhelmed.

And all this, don’t forget, comes in an era of food fascism, where every mouthful is graded, guided and laced with guilt, an era in which women obsess about their bodies every fifteen minutes (which is, apparently, more than men think about sex). A third of women admit to using slimming pills and laxatives, and 98 per cent of us recently told a magazine survey that we HATE our bodies. Such dysfunction leads to some spectacularly bizarre behaviour. Chew over the fact that in the UK we spend £3 billion a year on fast food, £3.6 billion on chocolate… and £2 billion on diet products. Isn’t that absurd?

The only comforting thing for me about all this is that it’s not just my problem. It’s yours too. We’re all at it. In my travels as a fashion journalist, the women I encounter often seem stricken by a paralysing body crisis, spending their entire life-the only one they’ll ever get – feeling bad because they’re feeling fat. An unconscionable waste, sure; but I know how real the body blues can be. I’ve been there too. In fact, I’ve got the T-shirt (a huge baggy one with DON’T LOOK AT ME! emblazoned on the front in big bold letters). When I gained weight after having children, I too felt dumpy, dreary, about as sassy and engaging as a sideboard. It seemed that my body shape could, with an extra few pounds here or there, dictate the very shape of my day. Like so many women, I spent years attempting to keep up, trying to slim down, poring over calorie charts, gleaning juicy little tips from celebrity trainers and Hollywood chefs, using every ounce of will-power to stop myself succumbing to the pull of the all-butter flapjack or that last, provocative roast potato.

But one day – a good day, a strong day – I’d had enough. I came to my senses. I’m still me, I thought. I’m just wearing slightly bigger trousers. I looked at the research. I looked at my life, trapped between the bedroom mirror and the bathroom scales, eaten up with the dull minutiae of weight control. I realized that not only was serial dieting an appalling waste of time, energy, money, conversation and emotion – it was also, ultimately, utterly pointless. That was the final ignominy of it all: in the long run, dieting doesn’t work, won’t work, can’t work – and will almost certainly leave us worse off. So I stopped. Right there.

As a consequence, I started to write less about John Galliano’s organdie kimonos and whether Pradatnade sense (the jury’s out), and more about grittier, bread-and-butter issues: our connection with our bodies, our need to be contenders, how our shape -the shape of the nation – is changing (fast), why we’re so very obsessed with dieting-and how, vitally, it just doesn’t seem to get us anywhere.

But if dieting was a fraud, then what would work? What could serve up the dream of slim without the demands of Hay, Atkins, Zone and the rest? What was needed, it seemed to me, was a live-it, not a diet: something practical, sustainable, effective – holistic, even – a way of life that viewed my appetite as part of a wider picture, a realistic picture which encompassed my body image, self-esteem, lifestyle and the regular ups and downs of my normal life, and not one only suitable for Hollywood starlets, heiresses, models and people who have staff to juice their morning beetroot.