Lee Randall: Band together as sisters in cellulite

Published on Monday 5 July 2010 18:46

SO VANESSA Feltz has gone and had herself fitted with a gastric band, in order to lose roughly four or five stone.

This isn't the first time Feltz has gone public with a weight-loss project. Around the time of her divorce she embarked on a very successful regimen, encompassing food restriction and gym attendance, up to and including getting hot and heavy with her fitness instructor, which is as good a form of exercise as any I've found!

But the weight returned. That's what it does, and that's why people are forever saying "Diets don't work." As you know from reading this column, I insist that diets work perfectly well, it's maintenance that no-one's ever managed to crack, partly because few of us who struggle to maintain svelte goddess status eat out of physical hunger - it's the emotional yearning that sends us running to the kitchen every damn time.

That, at least, is my excuse for putting back on roughly half of the weight I took off. Viewed through a half-full glass, I'm still noticeably below my starting point. But I'm a half-empty gal, which explains why I'm not the blithe spirit I hoped to be at this point in time, tripping the light fantastic in an array of small-sized garments while hanging off the arm of a dashingly handsome stud muffin.

As Vanessa surely knows, we consistently fool ourselves into thinking we are smarter than our bad habits. We think this time it's sorted, this time I will be a paragon of dietary virtue.

I'm sure Feltz, like the rest of us (oh, all right, me) wants to be fixed. Permanently. By someone else. Because she's sick and tired of thinking about it and just wants to outsource the hard work for a wee while.

You're probably sensing a wave of empathy flowing from me to Feltz, and you're not wrong. She may not be my favourite telly personality, but we're sisters under the cellulite. I'll bet we eat for all the same reasons: because we feel we're not good enough, despite all our achievements; because there's too little love in our lives (and more importantly, we lacked well-expressed love while growing up); boredom; laziness (yes, for the likes of us, it's easier to eat than exercise self restraint); lust - oh I could go on and on. Let's just say we're not the type to respond to stress by dropping a dress size or three. We go up the way, because we've self-medicated those unhappy emotions by smothering them in food.

Her announcement prompted a raft of scare stories warning about the dangers of gastric bands and other, similar, forms of bariatric surgery.

I have never understood how having a smaller stomach or feeling nauseated is meant to stop me eating. If I only ate to capacity, or when my body called out for sustenance to maintain its basic biological functions, well, I would be at my target weight!

Some band wearers don't even lose weight and most regain it all within a few years of having the band removed.

Other dangers can include bone thinning (leading to fractures), anaemia, kidney stones and psychological problems.

Or death. One woman had such severe complications, including leaking bile, that she eventually died of organ failure. Another woman died of blood poisoning in similar circumstances.

Scary, yes, but plenty of you are thinking, "I'd chance it."

It's the same group - and yeah, I felt the briefest of flutters - whose eyes lit up this week, reading about hemopressin, a chemical being touted as a potential cure for late-night kebab craving.

Read the fine print and you'll discover it's only been tested on rodents - always the first point of call, scientifically speaking. Why, I can still see the pictures of fat and thin mice they showed at the conference where they unveiled leptin, the great satiety regulator - and great white hope of chubs everywhere. It's been nearly two decades, and there's still no handy pill in the shops to manage that, either.

I know I repeat myself, but it's as much for my benefit as yours: there are no miracle cures; there's no magic potion. We just have to do the work - every day - of eating sensibly, and exercising, and finally accept that that's life. z