Not Dawn French proper plump mind that might warm your heart, but a kind of sexy, eats-the-occasional-Mars Barand-just-gets-away-with-it plump. Something for your average lumpy broad to aspire to. Now there she was on the cover of a food magazine this week looking "forget it" thin. Skinny white arms struggling to hold up a tray of buns, huge teeth and suspiciosly younger and wrinkle free. It really annoyed me.

You don't have to look like a fashion model to be a good cook . . . but it helps. You also don't have to look like a fashion model to be a good actress or a good novelist . . . but it seems it helps with those things also. The only people it makes a difference to look like a fashion model to are . . . newsflash . . .fashion models!

So why, why, WHY are we doing this to ourselves ladies?

Do men want us to be skinny, white-toothed, botoxed-faced Stepford wives? No. Is it attractive, really, this homogenised, size-zero grinning skeletal look? No. Do we really want to be known throughout history as the generation who made the handbag-wider-than-your-waist look fashionable? Actually, I no longer think that this skinniness obsession is a fashion thing. I think there is something inherently wrong with us women. Fat is not a feminist issue insofar as I don't think it has anything to do with men any more. Fat is a female issue.

I am cross with Nigella because now I feel I have to lose a stone. Not that I haven't felt I had to lose at least a stone for the WHOLE OF MY ADULT life including when I was weighing in at a light-as-a-fart seven and a half stone. Gradually, with age, common sense has begun to kick in, insofar as I can feel the tides turning where my ambition is no longer to be stick thin, but rather to be whatever size my appetite for food decrees and not care what that size is. But it's not that easy.

I had to stop myself from watching another documentary about the size double-zero debacle this week because part of my dysfunctional mind would be thinking, "Hmmmmm . . . 12 litres of water a day and one protein bar a fortnight . . . I could do that." It seems that, despite the media attempts to convince us that extreme dieting is dangerous and stupid, we cannot get it out of our heads that life would be much easier and better if we were thin. But would it really?

I'm five-foot-nothing and once got so skinny I had to shop in the children's department of Dunnes. It was a brief period in my life where I was deeply unhappy and smoking 60 fags a day.

Was it worth it? No, not really. Except it meant I got to wear a bikini and enjoy it for the first time in my adult life.

On balance though, I'd trade the bikini for enough flesh on my hips to hold up a pair of size 12 (okay, 10! ) jeans, a fag-free lifestyle and a thriving relationship with my biscuit tin.

I just wish I didn't have to spend so much time reassuring myself that I'm okay as I am.