Four years ago, I had to ban myself from entering Marks & Spencer’s Food Hall. It used to be my favourite supermarket but I realised I was too weak to resist the many temptations on offer. I vowed I’d only buy my groceries online.
But in November, I had to buy petrol and the nearest pumps were attached to an M&S. Oh the horror when I realised I would have to go into the shop to pay for my petrol, to walk past the shelves of cakes and pizzas I’d forbidden myself.
Sure enough, at the checkout I paid for petrol, a chocolate cake and a packet of Yum Yums. And yes, those little sugary doughnuts were yum yum.
This was 12 years after a gastric sleeve operation had failed to help me maintain a healthy weight. It was also two months after I’d started on fat jabs and lost a stone.
Yes, once in store, even the miraculous Mounjaro failed to silence the food noise that called me to the cakes. I readily admit I have no willpower when it comes to food. Which is why I couldn’t agree more with the nanny state’s recent decision to put a lock on the cookie jar.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has a plan which he believes will save our floundering NHS, and his primary and immediate concern is obesity. It’s the number one cause of sickness and disease today and costs the NHS £11 billion a year.
Streeting is right to insist supermarkets must promote healthy food or risk a fine. I hope he’s also right in his claim that the reduction of a single sugary fizzy drink a day could halve obesity in the UK.
But I feel he hasn’t gone far enough. Go for the food industry too, Wes – less sugar, less salt, fewer preservatives please.
Up and down we went, getting a bit fat, then thinner from the strict dieting, then fat again as we enjoyed trips to the seductive supermarket, says Jenni Murray
Hide the pizzas and cut down on burger bars near schools and in areas of deprivation.
You see, I know a bit about obesity. And how willpower evaporates in the face of fatty foods. I know exactly where my own trouble started – in the supermarket aisles.
Until my mid-teens, I was a big girl, but never fat.
My mother was slender and never worried about her enviably slim waistline expanding.
Back then feeding a family was an art form with a careful selection of healthy ingredients.
Then, in the 1960s, the food industry began to seduce us with colourful cakes, biscuits, fizzy drinks and ready meals.
I no longer wanted Mum’s home-baked bread. Bottles of sugar-laden Coca-Cola appeared on the dinner table.
Then came the readymeals. Vesta curry or sweet and sour pork were so easy to prepare and seemed so foreign and exotic.
I can taste them still – disgusting, but, hey, they were modern, and no one worried about how nutritious they were. Mum said it made her life so much easier. Yes, she put on a bit of weight, but there was Weightwatchers to deal with that. Up and down we went, getting a bit fat, then thinner from the strict dieting, then fat again as we enjoyed trips to the seductive supermarket.
At university, meals were eaten in the canteen. Chips with everything. Serious weight gain led me to a doctor for help.
The slimming pills he gave me worked brilliantly in terms of weight loss but they drove me temporarily crazy. They were amphetamines. So began my life-long battle with obesity. I know my weight has cost the NHS. I was 18st when I fell down the stairs and broke both my ankles, clearly weakened from the heavy weight they were carrying. I have no doubt the weight contributed to the oestrogen-receptor breast cancer I suffered in my 50s. Yes, I was on HRT, but fat cells produce oestrogen, too.
I was in my early 60s when I chose to spend £9,000 on surgery to reduce the 24st I’d managed to reach. A gastric sleeve did the job – I lost half my body weight in a year. But five years later the food noise seduced me again – I put on four and half stone and by last year weighed 16 and a half stone.
Mounjaro, which I’ve now been taking for ten months, is working, but it costs me £200 a month. And clearly, it’s not entirely M&S-Yum Yums proof.
I fear Wes Streeting’s plan will need more than a nudge if he thinks it will persuade the food industry and the supermarkets to change. The sugar tax on fizzy drinks has had very little impact on reducing obesity. What’s needed is radical change which I’m afraid will need noisy and consistent nannying.
It’s a big job, but it’s insane that the food industry made me obese and now it’s the pharmaceutical industry that’s slimming me down.
Not many can afford such help so get the supermarkets to keep the bad food and drink away from us. We can’t be trusted to resist.
Jan’s right about sloppy TV speech
Jan Leeming criticised today’s news readers for their poor pronunciation, mumbled speech and heavy accents
When Jan Leeming was a news anchor, every word she said was clear and correctly pronounced. Now 83,she’s worried about showing her age by calling out current news readers.
They say ‘grievious’ instead of grievous, ‘mischievious’ instead of mischievous – three syllables not four. Not picky at all Jan, but professional, as I too was trained to be. Sloppy speech is unforgivable when your primary job is to be intelligible.
- Most of us know someone who’s fiddled the benefit system at some point and Sir Keir must stop them all. The truly disabled need our help, no question, but this week official figures showed Personal Independence Payments had been handed out for acne, alcoholism and writer’s cramp? Why on earth is no one told to pull themselves together and get a job any more?
No one needs TWO diamond rings
Lauren Sanchez Bezos now sports not one but two huge diamond rings
Lauren Sanchez Bezos had a 30-carat $3 million pink diamond for her engagement ring, then a larger, brilliant-white 35-carat diamond worth $8-$10 million for the wedding.
She wears them both.
That, Mrs Bezos, is more than over the top. Frankly, when there’s so much poverty in the world, it’s grotesque.
I can’t say I’m surprised we Brits love the beauty industry, for the first time spending more on beauty than attending football matches, going to the gym and visiting amusement parks combined. It’s value was £30.4 billion last year. I can’t live without my weekly manicure and pedicure and six-weekly hair appointments. Yes, they cost a fortune – but worth every penny.
Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Radacanu pictured at Evian’s pre-Wimbledon event last week
If Emma Raducanu is wavering about whether to date her doubles partner Carlos Alcaraz, surely his dash to help the fainting spectator at Wimbledon this week proved that he’s most definitely a keeper.
