I’ve never been proud of being an apple. Given the choice, I would rather have been a pear any day. At least pears have waists and can hide their big bottoms under skirts. Besides, men find big bottoms attractive, but I’ve never heard one extolling the allure of a spare tyre.

To add to an apple’s woes, it has become increasingly clear that, as well as being unglamorous, having a high centre of gravity is unhealthy. Women with big bottoms, we’re now told, have a much lower risk of heart disease than those of the same height and weight who pile it on around the middle. And the bad news doesn’t stop with furred arteries: we have diabetes, Alzheimer’s and breast cancer to look forward to as well.

A few spare handfuls around the middle is manageable, but, with menopause, even pears put on weight around the waistband, and apples who don’t watch out can become melons. So when I heard about a book by Marilyn Glenville PhD entitled Fat Around the Middle: How to Lose that Bulge for Good and Why it’s Not All Down to Diet, I leapt upon the scientific tome. For someone like me, with more enthusiasm for eating than for exercising, the book has instant appeal, because Glenville says that the way to shift the spare tyre is not by diet alone ? not even by diet and exercise ? but by understanding what causes it. Her answer is stress.

Stress generates high levels of the hormone cortisol, which puts the body in panic mode and encourages it to store fat close to the liver where it is most easily converted back to energy. So, according to Glenville, the way to shift this fat is to reduce stress levels. “Unless you reduce stress,” she says, “the best diet in the world cannot help you. This problem can only be solved from the inside out.”

A major villain

I had my doubts. My mother is, and always has been, apple-shaped, too. Living in a retirement home with nothing much to do except the crossword, she could not be described as suffering from Glenville’s Hurried Woman Syndrome, yet she is looking more like a Granny Smith every day. Our shape, I had always assumed, was simply genetic bad luck, but I can never resist a measurement.

The PhD said I should divide my hip measurement by that of my waist, and, if the answer was greater than 0.8, I should be concerned. I did and I was.

Her plan for waist-whittling involves eating a little and often (every three hours) ? so the body never feels under stress and thus tempted to store fat ? banishing refined sugars and carbohydrates (including milk as it contains lactose), adding protein to all meals, never eating on the run, cutting out tea and coffee as they stimulate cortisol production, and taking three months’ worth of a wide range of supplements (metals, such as chromium, and vitamins and herbs like rhodiola and valerian), which either reduce stress levels, or counteract its ill-effects.

Glenville also recommends sleeping more, learning to relax, and having tests for adrenal stress, insulin resistance, food allergies (a cause of stress), yeast and parasites. Add in aerobic and non-aerobic exercise, and, after three months, the apple will be well on her way to becoming an hourglass. Tempting.

But, I decided to check her theories with Karen Miller-Kovach, chief scientific advisor to Weight Watchers International and an American nutritionist who also has a string of scientific qualifications. From her eager acceptance of a coffee with (skimmed) milk, it was immediately apparent that she was not going to share Glenville’s views. And she doesn’t.

She agrees with the thesis of the book, in so far as it points the finger at fat around the middle as a major villain. She also agrees that both men and women are getting fatter round the middle, but she believes this is because they are fatter in general ? not because erstwhile pears are turning into apples due to excessive stress. From here, the gulf gets wider.

Really depressing

“Stress does have a relationship to weight,” says Miller-Kovach, “but it is not physiological. Stress impinges on our ability to practice good habits.” She has reviewed the studies on cortisol and finds them to be mixed.

“I could find some that support the view that cortisol is the problem, and an equal number that say cortisol is nothing to do with anything,” she says. “It’s just one in a pool of hormones that work together. You could be incredibly stressed, but your cortisol levels wouldn’t rise, or you could be a very calm person with high cortisol levels. And there are no studies that show that diet has an effect on cortisol.”

Like me, Miller-Kovach is hitting the menopause ? a time of life when fat seems mysteriously attracted to the waist. “It’s really depressing,” she agrees. The answer does not lie in reducing stress, but in falling oestrogen levels. “Oestrogen is like the traffic cop that directs weight to the hips so you can feed babies. When oestrogen levels drop, it doesn’t do that any more, so the weight gets stored around the waist.

“Thousands of middle-aged women come to Weight Watchers complaining of expanding waistlines. They say they are eating what they have always eaten, but they are putting on weight.”

This, she says, is because, with the menopause, women lose muscle. Since metabolic rate is related to muscle mass, they need to eat less and less as their metabolic rate slows down.

Although Weight Watchers doesn’t believe in obsessive measuring, she says: “The hip-to-waist ratio is not as important, according to the World Health Organisation, as the waist itself. Anything over 35 inches is unhealthy.”

Her prescription is not to fuss too much about what you eat and when ? unless you have incipient diabetes, when sugar is more harmful than fat ? but to keep the overall calorie count down. Apart from the heavy doses of supplements, which, she says, act like drugs, she considers the suggestions in Fat Around the Middle to be a sensible way of achieving that. “Follow them [Glenville’s suggestions], and you will lose weight ? and some of it will be from around your middle.”

The Daily Telegraph