A recent report in The Times about the number of women and young girls suffering from eating disorders was disquieting but unsurprising.

To many women, dieting, or the plan to go on a diet, is as much part of their way of life as getting their hair done, straightened or coloured.

Sadly, the ones who have the most willpower when it comes to dieting appear to be the ones who end up with anorexia and its related problems.

The rest fail at dieting and remain overweight. In the UK, it has been found that 96 per cent of those who diet put all the weight back.

Almost everyone is dieting and, yet, despite the proliferation of special diets, despite the fact that we go to the gym or health centres and read countless of articles on how to keep fit, we are apparently among the fattest women in Europe.

We now have the knowledge, we know which foods are healthier or less fattening but we are still getting fatter. Have we so lost control as women that we need to be taught how to eat? And this, mind you, when most of us are the persons responsible for the family's food consumption! Dieting is making us fatter.

What have we done to our metabolism? Can we, at least, now avoid passing the wrong messages to our kids? They watch their mums either overeating or following a diet.

If you diet and starve your body of food, your body will fight harder to store the food. So, every time you diet, you are actually teaching your body to treat food like something to store, not something to use and burn.

Women who are fat or who are fighting off the fat pass their own problems on to their kids. Just as the many thousands of Maltese women who never achieved much at school are now desperately pushing their kids to achieve what they did not, in similar fashion we are pushing our kids to aim for the perfect body.

Any diet just shifts the weight once. If you then go back to your old eating habits, it goes back on, so your skin puffs and stretches and lines more easily if you are yo-yo dieting.

Of course, men too have weight problems.

There is a basic lesson to all - you just cannot take as much food as you want. If you do, it will come back to haunt you. If you overeat one evening, just take it easy the next, rather than overeating for a month and then having to diet for two or three months! Find a weight level that suits you and eat to suit it, not the other way around.

If you treat food wrongly, it will stick to you for good. Diets make us fat. Get consumed by something other than your shape. Take up an interest, develop a passion, use your mind and stop being obsessed about your body.

So far as I am concerned, nothing exemplifies women's inferior status to men in society than our willingness to make our body shape the be-all and end-all of our lives. The truth is that dieting has become the norm for so many women today.

There have to be better role models for our future women than Barbie or a Britney Spears.

Oh yes, and why are we all suddenly going blonde too?