Don?t get me wrong, though (and this is where I part company with Ricky and Elton); the book?s success didn?t mean I suddenly become comfortable with my body shape ? that would have been a bit much to expect, with a lifetime of self-doubt behind me. It did, however, dawn on me that thousands of other women evidently shared the belief that everything would be better if only they were thinner.
It was a heartening discovery, but I?m afraid I can?t say the realisation made me happy to pop a bikini on or wear a sleeveless dress without a care in the world.
That was 13 years ago. Since then other, arguably more important, things have drawn my attention away from my shape: having babies, for instance, and caring for beloved dying parents and step-parents, and all the while wrangling a career while attempting to be a mother.
As I watched my skinny, leggy, wholly unlike-me daughter grow up, and agonised over how best to answer her questions about what Paris Hilton and Abi Titmuss (among other names drawn from that dubious stable of the inexplicably famous) had done to make them well-known, I began to think about how girls today regard themselves and whether they are less or more likely to fret about their size than I did in my youth.
Sadly, all evidence would indicate they worry more. Cases of anorexia have risen sharply, and many experts blame a constant fusillade of images which suggest that the only desirable or enviable women are young, skeletally thin ones.
How does a 13-year-old girl calibrate her own appropriate and healthy body size when a model not much older is being feted rather than admitted to hospital?
And then I started to think about how my own insecurity over my weight and shape had started. I began to consider writing a book about why I?d asked if ''my bum looked big in this?? ? about why I believed the ''real me?? must be thin. Even though it turns out it?s a generic malaise for most women, we each have our own route to that place where the madness takes hold.
In my case, I was a much longed for but chunky girl born after two boys. It was made clear to me that my parents had been expecting a thin daughter and that this one, me, was deliberately hiding her to irritate them. My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don?t have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don?t have children who are overweight. When I ate (which after all I had to, didn?t I?), they used to say: ''Are you doing that on purpose to annoy us???
My flamboyant mother?s favourite put-down was ''watching you eat is like having hot knives stuck into my eyes??. I quickly learnt that me-plus-food made them cross ? eating became laden with negativity. If I wanted to please them I need only eat and weigh less; and if I wanted to upset them I need only eat and weigh more. Unable to surrender myself to hunger I choose the latter and embarked on a combative, lifelong struggle with food ? if I lost weight I felt temporarily good about myself and if I didn?t I felt bad.
Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.
However, I never completely shook off the belief that the ''real me?? was supposed to be thin. My parents loved me, of course they did, they just wanted to modify me. My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles. At the very least it might have been nice to grow up without the soundtrack of sharp intakes of breath every time I ate a chocolate biscuit.
The real me now may not be thin but she?s got the cake and, if she likes, can eat it too.
There?ll always be a little voice in my head sneering ?do you really need to eat that?? I?ve just got better at ignoring it.
- The Real Me is Thin by Arabella Weir is out now in paperback, price �7.99
- Arabella will be appearing at the Telegraph Ways with Words Festival on Thursday July 14 at 7pm
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