Goodbye to DIETS

Shahroo Izadi used to weigh 120kg and now that she’s thinner, she says it’s as if she’s gone undercover. “The people who don’t know that I used to be overweight treat me completely differently. They treat me with respect. It’s unsettling. My body might have changed, but I’m seeing through the same eyes.”

Shahroo is 35, a not irrelevant age given that so many of her clients are of her generation, with formative experiences to match, she says. They come to her because they want to lose weight. This will seem trivial to some readers. It seemed trivial to me. When I was asked to interview the author of a new book called The Last Diet, I was circumspect. The fact that she sees her clients in a clinic in central London, which seemed to me to fit the mould of high-end quackery, not to mention that many of those clients are no more than a size 12 – was she advocating an unhealthy emphasis on weight loss?

But then, when I meet her, she describes to me the things that go on in the heads of her mainly female clientele and, by extension, in the heads of millions of ordinary women, women like many of my friends, whose occasional annoyed comments about their own bodies I’ve always taken for self-involved whining. It was a chance placement in an addiction clinic after her psychology master’s that more or less saved her life – for the first time, she was able to understand her unwanted and destructive eating habits as something other than greed or lack of self-control. And how then working as a frontline