Put Jenni’s book in every school as a warning to girls

Fat Cow, Fat Chance Jenni Murray Doubleday €18.95 ★★★★★

When I review a book, I mark interesting pages with Post-its. Almost every page of Jenni Murray’s memoir about her struggle with obesity has its own flag, plus lots of scribbled ‘Yes!’s and ‘Blimey!’s in the margins. Such as when Jenni is asked by her GP to step on the scales and discovers she weighs 24st. Her son predicting the Woman’s Hour presenter will soon be forced to use a mobility scooter. Aged 15, being told by her fat-phobic mother she should wear a Playtex girdle. Blimey indeed.

Jenni was born in Barnsley in 1950. She grew up on the cusp of change: have a family, but also a career. Look like Twiggy, not Marilyn Monroe.

When her formerly stay-athome mother gets an office job, which means she exercises less and also cooks from scratch with home-grown produce far less, ready meals become the order of the day. Both pile on pounds, and Jenni is dragged to WeightWatchers.

At uni, away from her mother’s beady eye, Jenni ‘lets herself go’ and is so worried about disappointing Mum that she goes to her doctor, who prescribes amphetamines, which tip her into borderline anorexia. For anyone who thinks the anorexic and the compulsive eater are worlds apart, think again: they’re twins.

As a former anorexic, I recognise so much of myself in Jenni: always counting calories, never able to go out for dinner with friends for fear of what food might do to our body, which has become a battleground, hidden in baggy clothes from prying eyes. What’s sad is that food eclipses everything else, meaning happiness is fleeting. Instead of enjoying her career and family, Jenni is tediously thinking: ‘Does the dried spaghetti in my hand when bunched fit on the head of a 5p piece?’

This is a moving, brutally honest memoir about what it feels to be fat-shamed despite, as Jenni is able to prove, the fact that obesity is not due to greed, or lack of willpower – ‘I seemed to have plenty when it came to work and running a family’ – but is a disease.

The most moving passages are when she writes about her breast cancer and the bariatric surgery that ultimately saves her.

I’d put this book in every school as a warning to girls – and boys – not to waste their lives obsessing over food.

Two more Post-its: ‘I may be obese, but it’s not my fault.’

And ‘Dieting causes obesity.’ You can’t get clearer than that.