Mina had tried everything: WeightWatchers, Conley, grapefruit, Atkins, hypnotherapy and pumping iron. When she decided, after three gruelling months, that the Stone Age diet was doing her more harm than good, she felt that she had hit rock bottom in the abyss of despair. She weighed sixteen stone five pounds, just six pounds less than the day she had embarked on the Stone Age with such steely determination. She had been desperate to give up for three weeks, but she had forced herself to hang on until the day of her annual appraisal. She had wanted to look her best - but she didn't have to look in the mirror to know that it had been a hopeless ambition.
"I couldn't even get down to sixteen stone," she complained - aloud, because one of the few advantages of living alone was that she could talk to herself without being thought mad. She had been taught at school to calculate in kilograms but she preferred stones because the numbers were smaller. She had no difficulty dealing with big numbers - working for the National Audit Commission kept her busy with lots of those - but they seemed far less intimidating in the multitudinous bank accounts of the public purse than they did on her hips and thighs. Counting in kilograms also made her think longingly of continental Europe, which she missed sorely now she couldn't bear to travel any more. She couldn't cope with aeroplane seats, let alone Mediterranean heat.
She felt that she couldn't cope with her appraisal either, but there was no way of avoiding that. What made matters worse was that she really ought to have had her line-manager's job herself, and probably would have if Lucy Stanwere hadn't had a figure like Paula Radcliffe as well as an obvious hunger for further success. The fact that Lucy was able to wear four-inch heels, allowing her to tower over those condemned by gravity to flat soles, might conceivably have been irrelevant to her rapid ascent of the status ladder, but Mina didn't think so.
"Well," Mina said to herself, "at least I can have a hearty breakfast, now that I've fallen off the Stone Age wagon." She gorged herself on Welsh rarebit and chocolate milk, reflecting painfully on the roles that anxiety and depression had played in her history of comfort eating.