So, it's goodbye 2005 ... the year of the i-Tune, boho chic, the Sudoku nerd. It was also the year of the diet book. They trumped the best-seller lists throughout 2005 - the GI Revolution, Gillian McKeith, the fat-free French, and the Total Wellbeing Diet - all devoted to the gruelling art of skimming an inch off your hips. One look at the celebrities of the day - Victoria Beckham, Nicole Kidman, Lindsey Lohan and the rest - shows that this was also the year of the stick-thin star. By now, we should all be pittering about the place in size 6 skinny jeans, looking as though we'll pass out unless someone gives us a rice cake.
We're not, of course, because, as with all self-help books, we're more interested in the 'self' bit than the 'help'. Even so, the diet-book market is nearing satiation. One more wafer-thin publication and it might well explode, making a terrible mess all over the carpet in Waterstone's. And so, we're in for a new wave of writing for 2006.
Prepare for the arrival of chickpea lit - the confessions of the world's diet junkies. Just how does it feel to enslave yourself to cabbage soup? Where's the human face of the glycaemic index? Well, it's here. And it's female.
There's Candida Crewe with Eating Myself, her chew-by-chew chronicle of a lifetime enslaved to food. 'My normal abnormality is that I think about food or weight on average every few seconds,' she reports (to which I would reply, Candy, dear, you really should get out more. Anything to keep your mind busy and your fingers well away from the biscuit barrel).
Then there's writer India Knight, charting the ups and downs of her bathroom scales. Or Wendy Shanker, a self-confessed fat girl, sharing the cut and thrust of her meal-time heartache over 288 pages. 'I've met with seven weight-loss specialists,' she says, 'worked with three nutritionists and three personal trainers, tried a dozen weight-loss programmes, taken thousands of pills, joined six gyms, read 31 books and spent enough money on weight loss to buy myself an Ivy League degree...'
After all this, Shanker decides she'd rather 'take the focus off body image and put it on education, women's rights, human rights, the economy, baseball cards, anything'.
It's a hopeless crusade, though. While millions of smart, perfectly decent women out there recognise that most things are more important than the calorific content of a flapjack, while we all know that dieting is for ditzes, while great portions of the world starves...through all this, we can't seem to help ourselves. Call it conditioning, call it stupidity, call it facile, freakish and narcissistic. But dieting has become a way of life for Western women. Our heroines - all those stick stars - might boast that they clean their plates at The Ivy, mopping up gravy with great hunks of bread. But it's not true. They diet, as most of us do, chiefly because looking good in a bikini has become a goal more commendable than being able to speak a second language, more laudable than knowing how to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a biro. It's how we judge and are judged.
As a result, we have a dysfunctional relationship with our food. It's so much more tortuous a liaison than it is for men (which, broadly speaking, goes something like this: 'Hmm. Bit peckish. What's in the fridge? Cold sausage. Mmm. Burp. Who won at Chelsea?'). For women, the process is complicated by a whole family of inner demons. The one that bangs on about that clingy new top you've just bought when your fork is hovering above the lemon meringue pie. The one that buys Flora Lite and reaches for the butter.
The fact is that women love food, but then we go and spoil it all by hating it because we love it. It's bizarre. But I'm not convinced that reading about someone else's struggle with a chocolate éclair is altogether worthwhile. Isn't there something just a bit self-absorbed about it all? Rather than gaze at our own navels - which is tits-achingly dull enough - we're beginning to gaze at other people's. I say we've got better things to do in 2006. We could make peace. Or at the very least, make Pho. It's the new tom yum, didn't you know? And an excellent lunch for anyone on a low-carb diet.
