Wood's Big Fat findings

At the height of her compulsive eating problems, Victoria Wood weighed around 15 stone. At the time, she was married to conjuror Geoffrey Durham, from whom she split two years ago after 22 years together.

The separation came when several years of therapy had finally encouraged the 50-year-old comedienne to trim down to the size 14 she is today.

She now lives in Highgate with her children Grace, 15, and Henry, 11, and, in a documentary to be shown this week, from which the following is taken, she has turned her attentions to the diet fads that often control our eating habits.

We're very bad at being fat in this country. We can't eat fattening food without saying to ourselves: "Ooh go on, seeing as you've bought it." And when we do put weight on, do we actually celebrate our Rubenesque amplitude? No, those of us who are overweight queue up in church halls for dieting clubs and say things like: "It's not been a very good week, Pam, someone brought some lard into the office."

Twelve million people are in a slimming club or on a diet in this country at any one time. That's normal people, not massive people who are about to keel over because of their size. The people who join are just ordinarily overweight - podgy, pudgy, chunky men and women - but our, and their, excess weight must be worrying us because, oh boy, do we spend money trying to get rid of it.

As a result, the UK diet industry is worth an estimated £2 billion a year. But if dieting really works, you'd only have to do it once, wouldn't you? If the products we spend millions on really did anything to control our weight, we would only have to buy them once, wouldn't we?

I've been on and off diets since I was a child. But after all those years of worrying and struggling, the question I now have is this: why are people still buying diet products and joining slimming groups when the failure rate is about 95 per cent? Just remember this: the fat book you have just bought has paid for the book's writer to build a new conservatory or extension for their home. They are not working for you; you, in fact, are working for them.

The sad thing is that, if we're spending all this money to lose weight, it must really bother us to be fat. I know when I was a teenager, I absolutely bought into the idea that being bigger made you less of a person.

In truth, I was on various diets for 30 years or so. As a teenager, I tried every "quick-fix" diet there was. Whenever I had any problems, or felt any sort of emotional or professional pressure, I immediately turned to food. At one point, I had reached 14-and-a-half stone. And the reason? It was simply down to feeling inadequate, low selfesteem and hating myself. As the years went on, and I became a student and lived in a bedsit, I never went out because of my weight.

Today, I'm over that. Nowadays, I worry about so many other things that worrying about my weight is not on my radar any more. I can walk into the centre of London from my house, which is about five miles, and I would rather do that than stand on a treadmill in the gym watching Bargain Hunt with the sound turned down.

In my battle to lose weight, I tried 105 diets, but the worst thing I ever spent money on was a system of ropes and pulleys attached to the doorknob - it was supposed to make my stomach flat. But I felt like a prat attached to a doorknob, my stomach could never be flat after eating huge vats of macaroni cheese and I used it so compulsively on the first day that I tore all the ligaments in my back so I couldn't do my trousers up.

The brutal truth is, of course, that if you can't work out what emptiness you're filling within yourself by eating, then there's no diet in the world which will address that problem. And the heavier you are the more ashamed you feel.

Has this anything to do with the British obsession with who weighs what? Certainly, we're drip-fed attitudes about our weight every day and that has to have an effect on our feelings about ourselves. Nowadays, I am sad not because I was once "fat". I am sad because I let my anxiety over my weight cloud my life for so long.

The process of making the documentary, here in Britain and in America, the so-called Obesity Nation, has been really painful. One girl I spoke to said she wished she could take a cheese grater to her thighs. I wanted to say to her: "Who are you judging yourself against? Some airbrushed photo in a magazine of some model?"

If you are floundering in a morass of self-disgust and your eating is out of control, you're vulnerable. It's very tempting to put yourself in someone else's hands. The search for the product or the gadget that will do it for you can distract you from the real problem - you're eating because you can't have relationships with people.

Indeed, according to some surveys, a third of us will be obese by 2020. That's a third of us who will be running a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, people whose idea of an adequate meal has been distorted by the portion sizes offered us by the fast-food conglomerates. These days, we can hardly stagger a hundred yards without having to be revived with a bucket of milky coffee and a muffin the size of a bowler hat.

Which brings me, inevitably, to my main concern - the fact that moderately overweight people, whose body shapes would have been unremarkable 100 years ago, are today made to feel inadequate by being bombarded with images of toned bodies.

These people are preyed upon by a multi-millionpound diet industry which seems to offer a solution to a problem the food industry has largely manufactured itself. Eat more, diet more. It's precisely the sort of vicious circle I saw in making this documentary and, in doing so, it has certainly blown away some of my preconceptions about overweight people. Once, I was very suspicious of the happy fatties - you know, the "God meant us to be fat otherwise He wouldn't have invented elastic" brigade.

But once I had met them, I realised they're not happy because they are fat, but because their lives have damaged them and they have now, at last, made a decision not to spend any more time and money trying to lose weight. They have put all their energy into enjoying themselves.

I'm absolutely not saying people should not lose weight if they want to. But - from my own experience and from making this film - what I am saying is this: find out about yourself first, then decide. Don't just leap into dieting because you've seen some clever commercial or a celebrity on a diet in some glossy magazine.

You have to be able to face yourself in the mirror every morning. If you're happy with what you see, what does it matter what anybody else thinks? Doesn't that famous saying go something like this: "If life deals you a pile of manure, go and grow some roses?"

Well, if your life has given you a belly, go dancing!

Extracted from Victoria Wood's Big Fat Documentary, on BBC1, Friday 9 and Friday 16 January at 8.30pm.