Recently, I found myself in a —115C, human-sized freezer, wearing a black swimming costume, a woolly ear-muffed hat, thermal gloves and socks and dancing to the 1990s Vanilla Ice hit rap song Ice Ice Baby.

Bizarre, I know, but I was in Austria at the MAYRLIFE clinic, known for helping celebrities to improve their gut health and ultimately lose weight. 

I was there for a body and mind reset, having failed to put healthy eating and exercise on my priority list for many years, due to working full-time and looking after three young children. 

I’ve been eating a lot of quick-fix, sugar-laden foods, not exercising enough — even vaping.

Cryotherapy — the use of low temperatures in medical therapy — is one of the clinic’s many treatments to help heal your gut, lose cellulite, reduce inflammation and encourage weight loss. I left feeling wonderful.

But as I waved my arms in the air, I giggled to myself and thought: ‘How has it come to this?’ 

Until recently, I had never dieted in my life. And yet, in the past year, something has shifted

That at the age of 48, I’m so desperate to return to my pre-baby weight (my baby is now eight) — a size ten and a stone-and-a-half lighter than I am now — that I’m raving in an Austrian cryo chamber.

Until recently, I had never dieted in my life. And yet, in the past year, something has shifted. 

A lifetime of being told that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, being served constant messages and images telling me that ‘thin’ should be my North Star, finally got to me.

I joined an online weight-loss community where people share photos of their meals, track calories on My Fitness Pal, do set exercises and walk 12,000 steps a day. 

I lasted all of six days, my ‘hanger’ (so hungry I was perpetually grumpy and short-tempered) making me unbearable company.

I then opted for a ‘quick fix’ and downloaded a gastric-band hypnotherapy course, which makes you believe you’ve actually had the procedure. 

I fell asleep half way through the first session, never to listen to it again.

I paid for a monthly ten-minute Pilates-against-a-wall exercise course, which was served to me on Instagram. Three months later, I haven’t looked at one single exercise.

I even Googled the new weight loss ‘wonder drug’ Ozempic, controversially used by many celebrities to lose weight and now growing in popularity in the UK. At which point I thought: ‘Have I actually lost the plot?’

That at the age of 48, I’m so desperate to return to my pre-baby weight, a size ten and a stone-and-a-half lighter than I am now

I’d previously made a conscious decision not to think about baby weight gain for the past 12 years, enjoying the changes to my body, from the effects of breastfeeding to the post-baby belly.

So why was I now allowing societal pressures to be thin and look younger drive me to such extreme and totally out-of-character behaviour? 

And, more importantly, was this the behaviour I wanted to be modelling for my son and two girls, aged 12, ten and eight?

I have always looked after my hair and skin, but was never obsessed with my body. I was lucky to be brought up in Manchester with a mother and father whose self-worth wasn’t focused on their weight.

I saw my Iranian mum weigh herself only once in her life. It made such an impression on me I even remember what was on the scales — nine stone. I was eight years old at the time. 

She never dieted, never counted calories or bought low-calorie foods. She showed her love through great cooking, with healthy meals every night, and encouraged us to play sport, tennis in particular. 

She did, however, try to control our junk food intake, refusing to allow us to have a lot of chocolate or crisps in the house.

Until my 30s, I ate what I wanted without much change to my body. I was always a size eight to ten. I never thought about food other than to enjoy it. 

Six rounds of IVF and the ensuing steroids I was put on started to change my body — but the focus was on getting pregnant, so I didn’t care. 

I am lucky to be married to a wonderful man, aged 45, also a Mancunian, and the founder and CEO of a social media agency, who doesn’t focus on my weight and is more interested in us enjoying meals out and the odd glass of wine.

But now perimenopause has changed everything, rendering my body unrecognisable at a size 12, not just in weight, but shape, muscle loss and saggier skin.

Throw in a busy job that involves a huge amount of travel and client entertaining, always being on the go, grabbing food, and using sugar as an energy prop, and I started to question if, as the editor of a women’s magazine, there was an expectation on me to be thinner.

Someone once said to me: ‘I admire the fact you don’t adhere to the size-zero aesthetic often expected in the past from magazine editors.’ I began judging myself and disliking what I saw in the mirror.

And so, for the first time ever, in my fifth decade, I started trying to lose weight. Yet admitting this in public is another first for me — because in this era of ‘body positivity’, it can feel taboo to diet, let alone talk about it.

In the Barbie movie released last month, America Ferrera’s character lays out the dilemma for women in a speech that went viral: ‘You have to be thin, but not too thin. 

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And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but’ — and this is a big but — ‘also you have to be thin.’

The balancing act becomes trickier still if you’re a mother — and trickier again for a mother of daughters

I couldn’t relate to this more. We’re also expected to keep the same body in our 40s that we had in our 20s, but somehow not count calories; start dieting and exercising in March to be ‘beach body ready’ by July; eat healthily, but also drink alcohol and eat dessert when out with friends, because anything else would be boring.

The balancing act becomes trickier still if you’re a mother — and trickier again for a mother of daughters. 

For here the expectation is that as women we should be managing not only our own weight to fit society’s expectations of what is ‘normal’, but our children’s also, to protect them from patriarchal judgments around body image.

But with so many of us still struggling with how to find an acceptable form ourselves, where does modelling healthy eating behaviours end and disordering eating start? 

Only recently, the term ‘Almond Mum’ went viral on TikTok as a video resurfaced of Yolanda Hadid telling her supermodel daughter, Gigi, to ‘eat a few almonds and chew them well’, in response to Gigi admitting to feeling weak — with hunger, it’s implied.

Thousands of people shared stories of their own mothers trying to control their eating, putting them on diets from as young as ten years old, leading them to weighing themselves every day as adults, skipping meals, calorie counting, or obsessively exercising.

And while we may think ourselves to be in a more enlightened age, it doesn’t stop. One friend told me recently she was shocked to hear her mother-in-law say to her one-year-old granddaughter: ‘Who has a fat belly then?’ 

Another has told her own mother off for telling her girls: ‘No one will fancy you if you continue to eat sweets and get fat.’

Is it any surprise, then, that some have warned of an ‘anorexia epidemic’ unfolding among girls?

Two friends confessed that their daughters, both under ten years old, are expressing dissatisfaction with their bodies. 

One’s nine-year-old had stomach ache because she’d been holding in her tummy all day after a girl at school pointed at it and told her she looked fat. Another said her daughter was upset because her thighs are too big.

At home, I try not to discuss my body and weight in front of my children, though fail sometimes, asking my husband: ‘Does my stomach look big in this?’

But I do try to impress on them the importance of not eating too much sugar. Even then, I berate myself and wonder: ‘Is having ‘special treats’ the wrong way to deal with it?’ 

Should I do as some friends do and have a drawer of chocolate which the children can eat any time they like, until it no longer becomes something exciting to be cherished? It’s a minefield.

Given all this, no wonder it can feel near impossible to admit you are dissatisfied with your own body. 

A colleague who has lost a lot of weight recently told me it is regularly commented on as something negative or unhealthy even though she’s never been fitter — or stronger — in her life due to lifting weights. 

When she thinks of her daughter she wonders, why does the onus fall on her, not her husband, to model a ‘healthy’ body image?

‘No one would have the same comments if my husband lost lots of weight or became fit. People would be congratulating him for his gym body,’ she says.

The judgment around women’s and girls’ appearance (I still don’t think it’s the same for men and boys, though of course they too face pressures to look a certain way) is made even more complicated by how it is tied to our ageing process.

One friend told me recently she was shocked to hear her mother-in-law say to her one-year-old granddaughter: ‘Who has a fat belly then?’

There is a common view that women should ‘age gracefully’. But if you don’t dye your hair and don’t exercise, you’re accused of ‘letting yourself go’. Women can’t win.

In the meantime, a multitude of negative influences continue to shape women’s self-worth. 

As a magazine editor, I’m fully aware of the part my industry, along with advertising, has played in the creation of unhealthy body standards. 

I once had to ‘enlarge’ the frighteningly bony arms of a model in a shoot on another magazine I was editing, because I felt printing the images as they were was irresponsible.

I’m pleased to say awareness of unrealistic beauty standards has improved hugely over the past few years; my team and I at Glamour show as many body shapes as possible.

Yet even as we make progress, along comes social media with its own filtered version of reality, which is why I feel strongly that we can’t keep quiet about how we really feel about our own bodies and diets.

Having returned from the MAYRLIFE clinic, I’m very much focusing on my gut health, not my weight. I’m cutting out all foods I’m intolerant or allergic to and I’ve added weights to my exercise routine.

I weigh the same, but my mind is much clearer, my stomach less bloated and people have commented that my skin is glowing.

And most importantly, I’ve removed the scales from my bedroom. Because when my daughters are my age, the last thing I want is for an image of me on the scales to be how they remember me.