Susannah Constantine was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery as doctors told her she was ‘lucky to be alive’.

The TV personality, 61, was told she needed surgery immediately or risk paralysis, a brain haemorrhage or a stroke.

Susannah suffered from a venous fistula, an abnormal connection between an artery and a vein.

After the worrying ordeal, Susannah said she initially brushed off her pins and needle symptoms in her arm.

Susanna told me OK! magazine that she received sharp warnings from doctors during last year’s health crisis.

She added: “They said, ‘It’s Hobson’s choice: if you don’t have the operation you have a one in three chance of having a brain haemorrhage, becoming paralyzed or having a stroke.

“If you have surgery, you have a one in 10 chance of the same things happening during surgery.”

Susannah’s condition is typically induced surgically or occurs as a result of a congenital or genetic abnormality.

She said: ‘I had a health problem and quite a major operation. It was very rare that I had a leak: the arteries bled into the capillaries, compressed the spinal cord and affected my brain.’

It caused symptoms such as tingling in her arm, as well as a swollen left eye and ringing in her ears.

Last year, Susannah spoke out about the scary incident for the first time when she revealed she was rushed to hospital after struggling with a ‘withering arm’.

The presenter said on Instagram that she had been put on a drip after the health scare, which turned out to be ‘more serious’ than she first thought.

Fortunately, Susannah assured her followers that the health issue was ‘all resolved now’, and praised the ‘amazing’ NHS and neurosurgeons for their care of her.

Susanna posted a photo of her arm connected to a cannula and wrote: ‘A withered arm turned out to be a symptom of something more serious.

‘Everything is now sorted thanks to our ailing but still great NHS, where we are fortunate to have some of the most gifted doctors (and in this case neurosurgeons) in the world. @brainandspine. Forever grateful.”

Following Susannah’s post, many of her famous friends expressed their well-wishes in the comments, including Stacey Dooley, Faye Tozer and Lisa Snowdon.

Susannah previously revealed she suffers from hearing loss and shared details about her devastating diagnosis and the treatment that changed her life in an interview with The mirror.

She spent a lifetime in loud environments, juggling between production studios and live performances – but it was the inability to hear birds sing that troubled her.

The award-winning author realized she was having problems with her hearing earlier this year, but gave in The problem could have lasted a year and a half.

The famous writer – who lives in the countryside – said the birdsong was one of the most comforting things for her, as she suddenly couldn’t hear it anymore.

‘It was a cacophony of noise without clarity and differentiation. Then I realized it. Well, that in combination with my children [Joe, 23, Esme, 21 and Cece, 18] calling me deaf and getting very frustrated with me,” she said.

Susannah admitted that social situations were becoming increasingly difficult to tolerate, with ambient noise being ‘terrible’.

‘I couldn’t hear the person sitting next to me. I had become an amateur lip reader, but if I couldn’t see someone’s face, I had no idea what they were saying. It was embarrassing,” she revealed.

The clothing designer opened up about her ’embarrassment’ in seeking help with her problem – as she admitted she had always feared age-related hearing loss.

‘There can be a huge stigma attached to wearing hearing aids. I felt like I might as well go to the funeral home and order my coffin, I felt so old,” Susannah explained.

But things took a turn for the worse when the TV star decided to book a hearing test with Boots, finally overcoming the embarrassing stigma.

Recalling the moment she took her hearing test, Susannah said she sat in a soundproof booth with headphones on while listening to a persistent beep, only pressing the button when she could hear it.

The celebrity style consultant was initially confident everything was going well and was pretty sure she was ‘not deaf’ – but there were several pitches she didn’t know she couldn’t hear.

The test revealed that years of wear and tear – such as listening to music on headphones at a very high volume – left the author in need of a hearing aid.

The BBC star has undoubtedly had a life full of sensational moments, including touring with the Scissor Sisters in the past – where, as a huge fan of live music, she often got up close and personal with speakers.

Despite the initially devastating diagnosis, Susannah admitted that hearing aids changed her life forever. She described her Phonak as “transformative” and “comfortable.”

The former fashion journalist joked that the hearing technology is something like “NASA” and that it only blew her away after she tried it out.

Susannah explained that these types of hearing aids can become a comfortable part of your life because you can wear them while swimming or washing your hair – as long as you are careful.

She also said they have built-in Bluetooth, which she often uses to listen to music and make phone calls, although “the music isn’t as good as through headphones.”

The TV personality also revealed that her eldest daughter admitted that her hearing had improved significantly.

Susannah remembered her very first test, which was a loud, big party.

The award-winning author revealed that she was actually doing better than many of those at the party – with many asking to turn down the volume to talk, while for her it was all ‘perfectly positioned’.

Then things took a big turn for Susannah, as she said she was finally starting to embrace her new accessory.

She felt even better when she realized that her previous shame was so unmotivated, because many people around her showed support and even surprise at how “subtle” the technology was.

The writer recalled pulling her hair up and asking people if they had noticed ‘anything new’ about her – with some hilariously asking if she ‘had a piercing’.

The TV star admitted that seeking help for hearing loss proved to be groundbreaking as it allowed her to appreciate what she was missing – and take control of her life.

Susannah also urged anyone who notices symptoms of hearing loss to get tested.

Susannah Constantine revealed she “couldn’t be more proud” when she shared a photo with her son Joe Bertelsen as he graduated from the Naval Cadets at Dartmouth on Thursday.

The presenter, 61, said on Instagram that her son graduated today as a naval officer from the Britannia Royal Naval College.

Prince William, 41, also appeared for the parade, which saw a total of 202 Royal Navy Cadets pass out, along with International Officer Cadets from Oman, Kuwait, Bangladesh and Trinidad & Tobago.

Susannah is certainly familiar with high society as the mother of three, dated the late queen’s cousin, Viscount Linley, also known as David Armstrong-Jones or the Earl of Snowdon.

In an instant, Susannah, who looked refined and refined in a navy blue suede coat and a cream fur scarf, put her arm around Joe, who looked dapper in a navy uniform and held a sword.

She captioned the post: ‘Couldn’t be prouder… @joebertelsen Naval Officer’

Many rushed to the comments to congratulate Joe, with one person saying: ‘Wow!! Congratulations – what a beautiful photo too! xx’

Another wrote: ‘Congratulations young man. Good looking. You look beautiful, Susannah.’

Someone else said: ‘Fantastic! Huge congratulations!! Great picture!! xx’

Prince William also donned the uniform for the first time in more than a decade when he visited on behalf of King Charles.

He inspected the forward rank of the Guard and the Royal Marines Band of Plymouth, as well as the ranks of the St. Vincent, Howe and St. George Divisions.

He will also meet with staff and cadets on the historic Quarter Deck.

These include those who participated in the parade as well as their instructors.

The cadets undergo 29 weeks of intensive training, progressing from civilians to junior naval officers.

They have been tested in a variety of scenarios: in the classroom, on Dartmoor, the River Dart and at sea on board an operational warship.

During his military career, William trained at the Britannia Royal Naval College in 2008, following in the footsteps of his father, King Charles, and grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh.

The father-of-three was all smiles at the event, wearing a naval uniform which consisted of a trench coat with gold buttons and a navy cap.

Susannah herself has a close relationship with the royal family. She lovingly regarded Princess Margaret as her surrogate mother when she dated her son, David Armstrong-Jones, for six years in the 1980s.

Speaking on Woman’s Hour in 2017, Susannah explained how her mother, who had a lifelong battle with mental illness, was ‘at her worst’ at the time and Princess Margaret became ‘almost a mother figure’ to her.

She said: ‘I am not tactful or diplomatic… I remember Princess Margaret as incredibly warm and welcoming.

‘My mother was at her worst when I was dating David and Princess Margaret was someone I could turn to.’

Susannah acknowledged Princess Margaret’s reputation as ‘waspish’, adding: ‘She was a very kind woman once you got past the protective front.’

The mother of three, who became a household name after TV show What Not To Wear, revealed how her personal history inspired her first novel, After The Snow, which tells the story of an 11-year-old girl and her whimsical mother.

Susannah said: ‘My mother was manic depressive, I was quite a lonely child and I had one best friend.’ She recalled how her mother’s illness was completely “mismanaged.”

“She has never seen a psychiatrist or therapist,” the style guru said. ‘It’s a devastating condition and it was impossible for my father and obviously for her too.’

Despite the problems it caused, Susannah said she remembers “only good things about her mother.”

Giving a pig’s head a clean shave with one of my husband’s disposable razors is not what I had expected as part of my cooking prep — and yet that is exactly what I find myself doing during the week I try cooking like my granny, a gentleman farmer’s wife.

It’s all thanks to a controversial remark by French trade minister Olivia Grégoire, who advised the French population suffering from the cost of living crisis to save money by ‘cooking like granny’.

But does it work as a strategy? And how on earth will my Deliveroo-loving 21st-century family find it?

There’s no question we could do with tightening our belts, though. With two hungry 22-year-olds (my daughter and her boyfriend) back living with us after university, our weekly grocery shop has doubled from an average £80 to about £160.

Yet on the face of it, there’s no guarantee ‘cooking like granny’ will be that much cheaper. I’ll have to forgo the economy ranges, the budget pasta, cheap chickpeas and tofu-for-meat swaps, for example, as my granny wouldn’t recognise any of that as food fit for the family table. She and Grandpa were old-school, meat-and-two-veg types.

We must transport ourselves back in time to the Warwickshire farm where my Granny cooked — but, unlike her, we don’t own chickens or milk our own cows, and we can’t shoot game or forage for mushrooms. So all of that will cost us.

Also out are expensive fruit juices, kefir yoghurts, chia seeds, Japanese rice crackers, smoked salmon and the sirloin steaks that we might have for treat night on Fridays. There will be no sourdough bread, Kettle Chips, pricey dips or snacking between meals. Already, I begin to see how drastic a change this week-long challenge is going to be.

Yet the prospect isn’t all horrifying: Ms Grégoire’s insistence on ‘grandmother education’ was as much about the principle of avoiding waste as it was about the preparation of meals from scratch and the use of traditional recipes.

As the daughter and grand-daughter of matriarchs, I am already a devotee of food-prepping, famous within my family for my creative approach to leftovers and my disdain for ultra-high-processed food and over-bossy sell-by dates.

But I have become a bit lazy, since working full-time, about traditional cooking, blurring the cook-from-scratch benchmark by opting for ready-chopped flash-fry Asian options or easily assembled mezze-style menus. I cut corners to cut costs, but if I put in the effort necessary for a nose-to-tail, back-to-basics, traditional meal plan, can I succeed granny’s way?

I pull on my pinny and plan a menu of three meals a day for a week, based on my memories of Granny’s cooking: the offcuts of raw pastry she would give me, having rolled out a tart; or the salty, fatty indulgence of her beef dripping sandwiches;

‘Gravy, gravy, gravy! Sauces with everything,’ Mum reminds me.

‘Usually gravy-based or white sauce. I remember her pride in using every bit of the pigs from the family farm. We’d keep the legs, ribs and head and send the rest to the butcher to be made into pork pies. Oh, the excitement when the pork pies came back to us!’

Being broke themselves, the kids embrace the cost-cutting agenda and promise to try everything once. The boyfriend’s excited about nightly puddings, but my daughter is concerned that the dominance of meat will wreck the gut health she has achieved with her kimchi and turmeric shakes.

It’s true my family matriarchs were thinking more about value and convenience than they were nutrition. Most lunches involved leftovers from previous dinners; most food was chosen with longevity in mind; sugar and salt were deployed generously.

Furthermore, fridges were small and freezer space had to be rented in town, hence the preponderance of jams and chutneys in the pantry.

I show my meal plans to nutritionist Janey Bullivant for her verdict. ‘It is certainly a carnivore’s delight,’ she says, ‘and to be applauded for its fresh, whole food ingredients, slow cooking and re-purposing. But it’s limited in fruit and vegetables, which should make up a third of what we eat.’

Cost-wise, it stands up. Stripped of our usual buys, our supermarket bill plunges by nearly £40 — and our takeout/eating-out costs of £130 disappear. If we stuck to this for a month, we would save a total of £680 on our food bills. What is, at first sight, an expensive butcher’s bill of £83 is worth it for the sheer delight of chatting flesh with our 72-year-old local butcher, Mr Stenton, who has carved it all.

Core to this ‘grandmother education’ is the art of conversation. Talk to your aged relative/butcher/fishmonger and ask them what they recommend. You’ll eat more for less and your meals will be tastier for it. But one cost my granny would never have calculated is my labour.

Normally, I spend 10-20 minutes preparing lunch, half an hour preparing dinner, with breakfast taken on the hoof. Sometimes we let Deliveroo take the strain.

Now, I hardly seem to be away from the kitchen, up to my elbows in flesh or flour for what I work out to be an average of three hours and 40 minutes a day. It’s satisfying wringing every ounce of protein from a pig’s head, making stock from bones and veg peelings, wasting nothing, not even the pig’s ears, which I slice and deep-fry for a sneaky snack.

I don’t recall Granny complaining about being tied to the stove, but nor do I recall her being visibly happy when cooking. But I do remember her satisfaction when we ate everything on our plates.

Memory is like opening a can of stout: at first, nothing really happens and then, suddenly, it all bubbles out.

All families have a domestic history and I realise I need to pass on ours to my own young adults.

My seven-day menu of game casserole and jam roly poly    

The total cost for one person to eat like granny for a week is £30.57, compared with the 2023 national average cost of £45 per person a week and to our own family’s average cost of nearly £75 per person. All costs are based on quantities for four people (or the total number of guests eating). Where leftovers are used, the cost of repeated ingredients is not included; if only part of a product is used, only the cost of that which is used has been included.

SUNDAY

Breakfast: Gentleman’s Relish on toast

Lunch: Leftover sausage croquettes and cucumber salad

Dinner: Roast chicken dinner

Pudding: Tinned sliced peaches and cream

A mix of leftovers from the previous day’s fry-up for lunch, a homemade staple of Granny’s (and my) cupboard for breakfast in the form of Gentleman’s Relish (spiced anchovy butter) is rounded off by a roast chicken dinner (roast potatoes, bread sauce from scratch, savoy cabbage and carrots, with a classic pudding and cream (Granny lived on a dairy farm.

MONDAY

Breakfast: Grilled brown- sugared grapefruit with a cherry

Lunch: Rough Chicken Soup

Dinner: Granny’s Game Casserole with green beans and mash

Pudding: Six-cup Steamed Pud

Picking the chicken from the bones and making stock from the carcass gives us the broth and meat for Granny’s unblended Rough Chicken Soup. Leftover veggies and herbs are stirred in at the last minute, plus a good squeeze of lemon. At dinner, guests enjoy Game Casserole: pheasant (bought online) is casseroled with mushrooms, silverskin onions, thyme and a dash of cream, finished off with toasted breadcrumbs.

TUESDAY

Breakfast: Porridge with cream

Lunch: Granny’s Eggaroni Cheese

Dinner: Granny’s Irish Stew

Pudding: Jam roly poly

Two of Granny’s cheats on the menu: first, eggaroni cheese (mac ’n’ cheese without the macaroni, using hard-boiled eggs, chopped into chunks, with creamy white sauce poured over, more cheese on top, and grilled). I loved this as a child.

Next up, the true country fare that is her Irish stew, the cheap cut of a small neck of lamb, cooked for four hours with pearl barley, potatoes and carrots. ‘It tastes almost medieval,’ says a guest. Never a fan of making pastry, granny makes her version of roly-poly using jam sandwiches, rolled and fried in butter.

WEDNESDAY

Breakfast: Grandpa’s Scary Mushrooms On Toast

Lunch: Cheese pudding

Dinner: Gammon knuckle & parsley sauce with bubble & squeak and frozen beans

Pudding: Jelly sundaes

Grandpa would roam for mushrooms on the farm and cook them for breakfast. We children feared we’d die a poisoned death, but the mushrooms, fried in cream with a pinch of mustard, were delicious. I have to use the bog-standard white version but they still taste pretty good. Cheese pudding used up any stale bread before market day’s fresh bread on Thursdays. In a casserole dish, you layer up stale bread slices with grated cheddar, pour milk over the lot and bake. The ham is brought to the boil in water, then cooked in Guinness for two hours, drained and roasted with brown sugar, cloves and mustard and finished off in the oven for 20 minutes. It’s followed by another cheat pudding: whipped cream with layers of red, amber and green jelly.

THURSDAY

Breakfast: Hot choc and dipping bread

Lunch: French onion soup

Dinner: Pigs’ tongue a la ravigote

Pudding: Iles flottante

The other granny, my Francophile mother, insists that we do a French day. My favourite breakfast on French holidays — stale patisserie from the day before, dipped into a bowl of milk with dark chocolate melted into it — is followed at lunchtime by a French onion soup, using the pheasant stock from Tuesday to deliciously rich effect. 

Star of the day is the pig’s tongue: it’s boiled for three hours then, with the top rough layer peeled off (faintly traumatic), sliced to serve hot a la ravigote — with an oily, herby, mustardy sharp vinaigrette that sets off the unctuous umami taste of the tongue. This was a Granny special and I soon remember why. Every scrap is fought over.

FRIDAY

Breakfast: Lamb’s kidneys on toast

Lunch: Kedgeree

Dinner: H-Bone of beef and trimmings

Pudding: Camp Coffee junket

Slicing the ureters out of the kidneys and peeling off the outer membrane, poaching them in milk and then chopping and frying them with butter and sage gets a big thumbs-down from this chef, even though it is actually delicious. It’s just too early in the morning for all that! Kedgeree for lunch is like a warm hug: a comfort food staple in our family that stretches a fillet of smoked haddock to feed four hungry mouths by mixing it with cooked rice, boiled eggs and curried onions.

The H-bone beef cut is taken from the rump but is no longer very fashionable because of its awkward wishbone-shaped bone. It’s not the prettiest and is a little chewy, but it’s tasty once it’s roasted for half an hour and left to stand for another 30 minutes. And just a spoonful of this junket (basically, coffee and chicory-flavoured syrup and milk boiled up with rennet and left to set) and I am whirled back to my granny’s dining room.

SATURDAY

Breakfast: Eggy bread in beef dripping

Lunch: Brawn, mini gherkins, parsley salad, sourdough toast

Dinner: Oxtail stew

Pudding: Blackberry & apple crumble

Leftover beef dripping for eggy bread (or a dab of Bovril and butter if there’s no beef dripping). Brawn (a kind of rough terrine, taking all the meat from a boiled pig’s head, pressing it into a jelly mould and letting it set in its own jelly-stock) for lunch is a tick in the ‘out there’ box. Oxtail stew is my daughter’s idea: she recalled my mum making it and made it at university.

A first for me — but utterly delicious.

EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: TV star Susannah Constantine says a photo shoot with Princess Margaret’s ex-husband, the 1st Earl of Snowdon, left her in agony

• Presenter Susannah Constantine has no fond memories of 1st Earl of Snowdon
• TV star met Antony Armstrong-Jones while dating his son, David, in the 1980s

By Richard Eden for The Daily Mail

published: 5:00 PM EDT, June 28, 2023 | Updated: 02:50 EDT, Jun 29, 2023

When I was 12, I was jolted awake by a searing pain in my stomach.

As the house was full with family and friends for the bank holiday weekend, I was sleeping in the little dressing room next to my parents’ room, so I soon woke my mother, Juliet, with my moans of pain.

She came in and looked down almost crossly at me. ‘No wonder you’ve got a tummy ache,’ she told me. ‘You ate so many canapes last night before I stopped you, I’m not surprised. You must stop being so greedy, Susannah!’

This was a well-worn reproach and would not have passed into family legend had it not been for the fact that this was actually the moment my appendix had burst. 

Over the course of the weekend, it dawned on everyone that this was not indigestion, and I was rushed to Harrogate hospital in North Yorkshire for a lifesaving operation and a two-week stay.

The canapes had been framed for a crime they did not commit.

Yet my mother stepping in to save me from my greed has been a theme of my entire life; she freely admits that she started controlling my diet early.

When I was 11, she took me to ‘darling Johnny’, her doctor in London. They put me on the scales and looked down at the number, approaching 7st (entirely within the acceptable range for a fairly tall, sporty girl of my age).

‘Oh dear,’ said the doctor. ‘That’s too high for your age. Better pop you on a diet.’ And so it began. I had never been a skinny child, but this was the first time I’d felt I was fat.

Only in my 20s did my mum confess that it had been a set-up — that she had asked ‘darling Johnny’ to say this to me, so she could persuade me that controlling my eating was a good idea. 

The notion that a mother would seek to interfere with her daughter’s eating habits may seem anachronistic in our body-positive era.

But any TikTok user will tell you about the #almondmom hashtag that has racked up more than a billion views in recent years, referencing exactly this global phenomenon.

The hashtag refers to TV footage of the then 18-year-old supermodel Gigi Hadid telling her mum she felt weak, having only eaten half an almond before a fashion shoot. 

To which her mum responded: ‘So have a couple of almonds and chew them really well.’

Many of my friends were horrified to learn that in the modern world of fragile mental health, where the spectre of anorexia looms so large, this kind of thing still goes on.

Yet it seems some mothers just can’t help commenting on their daughters’ weights.

After the visit to the doctor, my mother laid down some ground rules: portion control; no more second helpings; cutting down on potatoes and bread; no fizzy pop, cake or biscuits. 

Within a couple of years, she had me on various fad diets with her: packet soups; endless cottage cheese and chopped fruit; tasteless salads.

Meanwhile, at friends’ houses, I noticed they ate solid staples of meat and potatoes, followed by a ‘sweet’. I felt guilty every time I joined in, my suspicion that perhaps I was fat slowly hardening into a certainty.

My mum was aided and abetted by the spectre of my vast Great Aunt Margaret who, at more than 20st, was so fat she couldn’t cross her arms and legs.

When I was 15, my mum slapped an old black-and-white photo of a girl my age onto the table beside the bowl of crisps I was about to tuck into. ‘This is a photo of your Great Aunt Margaret taken when she was the same age as you,’ she said.

‘And look at her. She’s thinner than you are now and yet look what she became. Do you want that? No? So don’t have those crisps!’

What my mother didn’t tell me until writing this article was that Great Aunt Margaret started gaining her enormous weight after an unspecified cardiac disease she developed from the age of 18, rather than simply overeating.

Even though I was hoodwinked into believing my DNA predetermined a fall into flab, I reacted like any teenager does against parental interference: bitterly, sulkily, defiantly comfort-eating toast behind her back, spending my precious pocket money on Curly Wurly and Marathon chocolate bars.

I was also angered by a sneaking suspicion that I was paying the price for her own weight issues; that, in me, my mother saw a chance to get it right second time around.

Like me, my mother was not a skinny child, but nor was she fat. Yet, like so many of her generation, she was trapped in the toxic misconception that to be thin is everything.

Over time, I developed a way of fighting back by trying to feel happy about being fat, knowing how much it would annoy her. 

‘Do you see the way you look from the back?’ was one exasperated observation when I was 27, twirling in a new dress before the launch of my first novel.

There was also a growing realisation that perhaps she was wrong about the merits of starvation.

This belief eventually culminated in the publication of my book about dieting, Fat, So? Researching the book gave me a new clarity.

First came the realisation that every woman was just as likely to hate their figure. Second, that the dieting industry thrived on keeping us paranoid about weight issues.

Third, that adjusting one’s diet dramatically would often make you fatter in the long term. 

Your body can’t tell the difference between a diet and a famine, so it makes preparations for lasting out a famine every time you go on a diet. 

The more ‘famines’ the body has to endure, the higher the subconscious brain will want your weight set point to be.

Dieting as a pre-pubescent or adolescent is especially dangerous, as it interferes with your weight set point before your body is ready.

I look back at photos of me as that 11-year-old and wonder if I would still have that average, not-thin-not-fat figure if I hadn’t been put on a diet so young. Now 54 and a size 16, I realise I spent the first 30 years of my life battling the flab.

In the past 20 years, however, I’ve fought to reclaim a balance of fitness, healthy eating (most of the time) and a hard-earned acceptance of who I am: mostly sexy and curvy, less often fat and flabby, but never thin.

I can’t blame my mother for wanting to control my eating. With age, perspective and my own self-education, I can now appreciate that she wasn’t doing it to be deliberately cruel, no matter how it felt to me at the time.

Nor can I resent her for essentially making me a little fatter than I needed to be, because she didn’t know any better. But in our family that shadow stops here.

With my daughter Adelaide, now 22, I negotiated the anorexia-riddled waters of the teenage years very, very carefully.

Yes, our image-obsessed world meant she would inevitably have her own body-image issues — but my controlling her eating would not be the answer.

AND HERE’S JULIET’S JAW-DROPPING RESPONSE…

The happiest day of my life was in December 1960 when I finally, at the age of 20, achieved my goal of a 24in waist. I hadn’t eaten anything for three weeks.

All my life I have taken the attitude that if something special was coming up, then I’d better get thin if I was going to enjoy it.

On this occasion, starving for three weeks was a small price to pay for wowing the man who was taking me to a film premiere that night, in the outfit I had made myself: an emerald green satin coat and dress with a scarlet lining. 

I dumped him a week later, for a glamorous older man who loved me being thin.

We all want to look our best and be liked, to have a good life, and even though the older man didn’t last long either, this was my best life — because I was thin.

As a teenager, I was neither thin nor fat, but I was always aware of my figure and worried that I was chubby, with what I thought were terrible legs. 

My own mother had a neat figure and never felt the need to control what she — or we — ate, but my sister and I felt we had to diet down if we wanted to pass muster in polite society.

My problem was that my uncontrolled weakness for chocolate bars led to a sudden weight gain of more than a stone when I was 15 — and from then on I was forever battling against my native greed.

I constantly wished I was one of those reed-slim girls who seemed to have been born with ironclad control over how much they ate.

When I became a mother myself, I wanted to get in ahead of the curve — literally — and make sure my daughter always had that control.

Especially since it was clear to me that, as a stocky little girl, she was going to have an unsatisfactory figure just like mine. 

I felt I had to get the message through to Susannah that it just wasn’t worth being fat. I don’t think you can enjoy life properly without being thin, properly thin, with no lumps and bumps.

If you’re slim and pretty, men want to sit next to you — and then you can charm them with your brains and amusing chat.

But if you’re fat, men won’t even see that you’re pretty, they’ll just think: ‘Oh no, I have to sit next to the plump one’ — and then it’s double the work to persuade them that you are clever and funny. It’s sad, but true.

Even when, aged 22, I went out with Susannah’s father Tommy, the love of my life, he said to me: ‘Lose a stone and I’ll marry you.’ 

I starved myself for a month and, at a party, went up to him and said: ‘Look, I’ve lost a stone — does this mean you’ll marry me?’

He squirmed a bit and it took another few months for him to propose, but we were then happily married for 57 years, until he died in 2020. That’s just the way men are.

I wanted to make life easier for Susannah, not harder. But I could see that she was a greedy little girl, whose endearing puppy chubbiness was going to turn into fat unless we headed this off at the pass.

I initially tried to keep it simple: puddings only on special occasions, no toast for breakfast, that sort of thing. 

The trouble was that at this time I was really struggling with my own weight, as I had done since being pregnant with Susannah’s older brother.

Having got down to a size 12 for my 40th birthday when Susannah was 11, I was starting to yo-yo back up again. At my very worst, in the early 1990s, I went up to a size 22.

So it seemed easier, more fun even, if we tried diets together. The Scarsdale, the Beverly Hills, the Cambridge, Slimming World — they all seemed to have names in the 1980s, and I think we tried them all.

Susannah was fairly resistant and thought it was terribly unfair that, for example, her brother was allowed to raid the sweet tin after lunch and supper when she was only allowed to on Sundays, but I was just trying to make her happier in the long run.

I genuinely thought that if I drummed in the idea of controlling her eating early on, eventually it would become less hard for her than it was for me, and then she could be more relaxed and natural about it.

But she wouldn’t get the message. I still find it frustrating that she isn’t thin.

When she wrote a book about not dieting, I was angry with her for talking about her childhood in public and I told her so.

We had some pretty heated conversations about it, but it was the first time she understood that I had done what I had done entirely with her best interests at heart.

Before that, she tells me, she had thought it cruel of me to control her eating, but it wasn’t like that at all.

I am glad that we can now talk about it — that’s the thing that has changed in modern times.

In my day, I suffered in silence. I looked around me, saw that everyone else was thin, and just got on with the grind of getting thin myself.

Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I didn’t, but I was always happier when I was thinner.

The fact that, at 82, I am much thinner now still makes me happy, even though it’s because I had a serious stomach operation three years ago.

Ultimately, I’m glad that Susannah thinks she looks good and I do respect her for forging her own course with her fitness and her body acceptance, but I don’t regret what I did.

I would still try to stop any daughter of mine from growing up fat.

These days, I would perhaps do it slightly differently, using the new medical interventions — appetite suppressant pills and those clever Ozempic jabs.

Doing it that way is better and easier than simply yelling at someone to stop being such a pig! 

•  Fat, So?, by Susannah Jowitt, is available on Amazon and abebooks.com