I should just like to add a little note to this thread. Make no mistake - my size was a big hindrence to my career (I once had a major London Agent say 'Terrific voice, wonderful songs, great guitar, super personality - but I'll never sell the image - how pathetic)... However, that is past history now and anyway I turned it to great advantage at times ;-) .... what IS interesting is this....

At nearly 60 I finally got to see a dietician that took a look at what I eat and who pronounced that in fact I eat a very healthy diet. The reason I am the size I am was that eating is NOT a priority with me and never has been. I will quite happily go without eating at all until the evening if I'm busy. Even then I eat the same size dinner as my husband (one course and a yoghurt or similar) - and he is stick thin. So the dietician diagnosed a slow metabolism in February and put me on a diet to boost this.

I HAVE to eat a bowl of cereal at breakfast, I HAVE to eat fruit mid-morning, I HAVE to have a sandwich or something similar at lunchtime, I have to eat fruit again mid afternoon... I have my usual dinner - then in the evening before I go to bed I HAVE to have another piece of fruit.

For the first month - nothing happened - so they decided to leave me for two months.... when I went back I had lost 7 KILOS. I went back recently for another check and had lost another 3 KILOS. I still eat the same type of food that I always ate but the weight is dropping off me.

So this idea that if you are very large you must eat junk food and a lot more than other folk is not always true.... and the stigma that programs like 'You Are What You Eat' create really makes my blood boil. The attitude of comedians and the sheer ignorance of the general public about the problems of obesity makes me want to murder some of them.

The insult that anyone is fat because they want to be - in a world that is so shallowly involved with 'image' and all the prejudice that it encourages - really shows how little the person concerned knows. It may be true in their case but it sure as heck isn't in mine. Nobody in their right MIND wants to suffer the rudeness of these ignoramusses day after day, or be crippled by the pain of obesity - or suffer the discrimination in the workplace - not just in music but everywhere, that results.

Hasn't the world actually progressed beyond this kind of ignorance? NO? How sad.

Rosie Hardman.
p.s. I may be retired but the fat lady just SANG.