I'm sure it has already been said, by many and more eminent people than me, but something I have felt over the past weeks and months is that my obsession with weight loss and dedication to dieting is easily comparable to following a religion.
For a start the meetings tend to be held in church rooms, (maybe because we're all hoping for a miracle every week) and there is an overarching organisation which runs the services, I mean meetings, according to their own particular doctrine.
Weight Watchers has its own ministers, or leaders as they like to call them, who are sent out to spread the word and convert people.
But of course there are other fat fighters clubs out there, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of some kind of violence breaking out between Weight Watchers and Slimming World for example. It could be called the Doughnut Wars, or something similar. And there are those weird, break away extremists who practise a dangerous cult of eating nothing but soup and porridge for months on end.
Every week we walk into church, sorry, the meeting room, feeling a mixture of guilt and hope. You know you are going to have to pay for your sins and have been living in a kind of limbo for the past week, punishing yourself for each little transgression. Instead of using rosary beads to pray you scatter a load of dried lentils on the ground to kneel on seeking forgiveness through the pain.
When you get into the meeting you wait in line to walk up to the altar to take communion, or get weighed as they call it, hoping for the high priest to absolve us of our crimes against the God of weight loss. (who would be the patron saint of weight loss, Saint Katona? Saint Idris? - see last blog) But there is no escaping the Truth. God, or the scales as they call them, can see everything and his word is, the word.
Then we confess our sins to our leader, we hope for forgiveness after coming clean about that second helping of lasagne, or the possessed way we attacked the barbecue at the weekend and partook of the devil's brew, or home made cider.
After the rapture of the scales we vow to lead a better life for the next week, and get given the latest scripture (or information leaflet they call it) from on high about how to be a better person.
Then follows the communal gathering to hear the sermon for that day; how to get a bikini body for the summer, or how to drop a dress size, or how to eat healthy food without dying of boredom at the dinner table.
Then we all go home and try to be good for the rest of the day before going back to normal the next day and pigging out in front of Eastenders making a silent promise to yourself to try harder next week, but you know you're going to hell in the end.
And of course you have to pay for it in cash as well as emotional suffering.
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