My excess

Up to then I had led a fairly conventional social and professional lifestyle and my tendency to put on weight had seemed to level off. My"overeating", if indeed I overate at all, was only very occasional and tended to occur in a family context. When you come, as I do, from South West France, you have been brought up to value gastronomic cuisine as part of your cultural heritage. I had long since given up sugar, or at least, sugar in coffee. I never ate potatoes, claiming to be allergic to them, and, apart from wine, very rarely touched alcohol.

My excess stone had been acquired over a period of ten years, quite gradually. When I looked around me I felt no more overweight than the average; in fact, it seemed to me I compared quite well with other people.

Then, overnight, my professional circumstances changed. I was appointed to a new post with an international dimension at the European headquarters of the American multinational company I worked for.

From then on, much of my time was spent travelling, and the visits to the company's subsidiaries that my responsibilities entailed making were inevitably punctuated with lavish meals.

Back in Paris, my responsibility for public relations involved me in taking mostly foreign visitors to the best French restaurants in the capital. It was simply a part of my job but, I have to admit, not exactly the part I dreaded most.

But three months after taking up my new post I had put on no less than a further stone. It has to be said that the three-week training course I had completed in England had done nothing to help matters either. At any rate, alarm bells were ringing, and urgent action was called for.