When deprivation is not a constantly lurking self-inflicted punishment, the craving for excess does not occur. She relishes the combination of good food and good company and the lunch is an enjoyable satisfaction of all the senses.When she was a young woman, just starting her career, she had not dared to order anything but “diet” food at working lunches, aware of the censorious eyes of her editor. One day she had been particularly hungry and unable to resist salmon en croute. The magazine editor, staring at her disdainfully while eating her own small salad, had not commented on her choice of “sinful” food.

Instead she had suggested a diet feature, a before-and-after makeover piece “We could do a lot with you,” she had said. “Such a pretty face, it’s a shame you’re so overweight.” A direct hit, one that hurt She does not return to the office for the afternoon She has a hospital appointment for a Well Woman check. Despite the advances of medical science, a number of things can go wrong at her age, some years post-menopause, and regular checks are a wise precaution.She is asked to undress and to put on a gown. She recalls the hospital appointments of her youth, of her childbearing years, humiliating obstetrical examinations of a time when medical staff were unstintingly rude to women of her size.

They had threatened her with everything from refusals to perform operations to the certainty of poor health and early death. She remembers the embarrassment of standing in X-ray departments, half-naked under gowns that would not meet round her body, trying in vain to hold on to her dignity. Thin may not be fashionable now, and thin women have long since fallen out of favour as cultural icons, but they are not persecuted as once the fat had been.Now she selects a roomy robe from a number of different sizes and makes her way to an examination room. A doctor and a nurse perform a full-body scan, a routine and safe procedure that has replaced the inelegant mammograms and uncomfortable smear tests of the past. It takes very little time and they are able to tell her at once that she is in excellent health. Nowadays a scan can measure all the body’s functions, obviating the necessity of old-style ECGs or blood pressure readings. A written analysis of the scan will follow to confirm the findings.There are questions she wants to ask.

Because she is over 60 and because she has never quite shaken off the painful experiences of the anti-fat indoctrination of her youth, she wants to know the health implications of her size “Your fitness level is superb,” the doctor tells her. “Why the concern about your weight?”"Won’t there come a point,” she asks a little anxiously, “when it will put a strain on my heart?”The doctor understands. “That’s what they told you when you were much younger? They believed then that high weight inevitably led to all manner of disease and death, but research has long since proved that was a complete fallacy.” She knows this, of course. She’s read the research, but a little reassurance does not go amiss.”The trouble was that the late 20th- century lifestyle was pretty unhealthy,” the doctor continues “High- fat food and not enough exercise did enormous harm. They made fat people scapegoats because the medical profession was particularly prejudiced.