The last time Christopher stood on the scales, he weighed nearly 20 stone. “I put on weight because I eat rubbish,” the 53-year-old teacher admits. “You know the sort of thing: bread, cakes, huge bars of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. Sometimes, I just can’t stop.”

Madeline, 5-ft-3in and just under 12 stone, agrees. “I can be okay during the day, but when night comes I start snacking. Before I know it, I have had way, way too much. I want to eat normally and think, ‘How hard can it be?’ But I never seem to manage it for more than a few days at a time.”

Christopher and Madeline are just two of the millions of Britons who are part of an obesity epidemic. According to a survey by the US-based Mayo clinic, three out of four Britons are now overweight. According to Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, the problem is “even more serious than global warming”.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson has announced the Government’s plans for a “lifestyle revolution” to combat a problem that each year causes 9,000 premature deaths and costs the NHS £5 billion. It included a host of suggestions to get Britain moving, including paying overweight parents to walk their children to school.

In fact, there are plenty of suggested solutions. Scientists have come up with anti-obesity pills — which stop fat being digested, so it passes right through the system — and there is talk of an obesity vaccine.

Yet nothing seems to halt the relentless weight gain — and the problem is exacerbated by Britain’s binge-drinking culture. Alcohol stimulates fat storage, leading to what health and weight loss coach Deborah Bonser describes as a new kind of body shape. “Gone is the hour-glass figure and apple or pear,” she says. “Instead, an increasing number of people have a flabby belly, but slim arms legs and face. I describe them as alco-shaped.”

For the record, you are classified as obese if your BMI (Body Mass Index) is 30 or over. That number is reached by dividing your weight (in kilos) by the square of your height (in metres), all multiplied by 4.88. For example, at 5-ft-2, and 8 stone 4 lbs, I have a BMI of 21.

That puts me in the middle of the range - which means that it can be difficult for me to understand the problems faced by the obese. If I put on a few pounds, I immediately cut down what I eat until I lose them. It has baffled me why others, apart from those who are ill or on certain medication, can’t do the same. David Cameron was right, I thought, when he said that some people who are fat have only themselves to blame. Why get fat when it increases your chance of heart and liver disease, all sorts of cancer and diabetes? Being overweight is also linked to Alzheimer’s, blindness and sleep apnoea.

So, if you are overweight, why not do something about it? It is not so simple. While the dubious benefits of so-called slim-line foods, laziness and today’s sedentary lifestyle are all in part responsible for weight gain, the real key, is, I discovered, emotional vulnerability. Get that right and the pounds will slip away. Ignore it and no vaccine, pill or operation is likely to do the trick.

“It is a vicious circle,” admits Dr Waine. “Individuals eat because they are unhappy, and unhappiness makes them eat. Until people have dealt with their emotional problems, they won’t lose weight, but many health and government professionals are happier to treat the end results, rather than the cause.”

Rebecca, 5-ft-5 and 12stone 7lbs, wishes that the NHS “would spend more on counselling rather than fund operations which do not deal with my ‘head’ issues. I want to eat normally, but I find it impossible, especially after an argument or when a plan has gone wrong.”

According to Deborah Bonser, who is writing a book on the subject, “Being overweight is a symptom of what is wrong with our lives. We eat to take away emotional pain. Overeating often starts as a reaction to feeling ‘not good enough’ as a child. If you don’t love yourself it is easy to overeat. It is also a response to a bad relationship, both personal and at work. To alleviate it, we lean towards food as pleasure, when what we really want to do is avoid the pain we are feeling. “I believe that 70 per cent of people who are overweight are emotional eaters and suffer from stress.”

Physician David Haslam, who specialises in treating obesity, doesn’t believe people deliberately pile on the weight for comfort. “It is more likely to be the result of trauma and stress. When people are upset, they raid the fridge, or have something to take the emotion away.”

Christopher the teacher insists, like many overweight people, that his eating is an addiction: “It is much worse than any other addiction because food is legal and so easy to get hold of.”

It is not a view held by Dr Haslam. “To be addicted to something that is a necessity to life is a difficult concept,” he says. “I think the word ‘addiction’ can only be used for luxury items like cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. Of course manufacturers process things with flavour-enhancers to make you eat more.... That is evil, but not chemically addictive.”

The fact that so many of us have a sedentary lifestyle doesn’t help. We travel to work by car or train, sit staring at a computer for hours, and then go home and watch television. But it doesn’t take much to realise that weight gain is inevitable unless you work extremely hard or are extremely lucky.

“People have to recognise they are overweight and decide to do something about it,” insists Bonser. “And if you have recently had a baby or are middle-aged you have to accept that your metabolism has changed and eat less. If you don’t, it’s just self-sabotage. You have to consume the calories to create fat. It takes 3,400 calories to put on a pound and the same to lose it.”

For the seriously obese, those with a BMI of 31-plus, a gastric bypass, an irreversible procedure that shortens digestive system by bypassing a segment of the bowel, or gastric band operation is seen as a lifesaver. The latter involves fitting a band round the upper part of the stomach, which the surgeon can then make looser or tighter depending on the amount of food he wants to restrict the person from eating.

Last year, 802 gastric bypass operations and 706 gastric band operations were undertaken in England on the NHS, at a cost of around £5,500 each. Both totals were almost double the previous year’s. TV presenter Fern Britton, who initially implied that she had lost weight by disciplined eating, had the operation two years ago and has subsequently lost five stone.

About 75 per cent of the individuals having these operations are women, some of whom cheat. One admitted to me that she liquidised Mars bars because she yearned for chocolate.

The Daily Telegraph

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