After her weight had climbed to 20 stone and she had reached a dress size 24, Nikki Law decided in July 2006 to have surgery to restrict the capacity of her stomach. She borrowed £9,000 to have a gastric-band operation at a private hospital, a crude but effective procedure that reduces the volume of the stomach by 95%.

Her hope was to get down to a healthy weight of 12-13 stone (she is 5ft 10in). Two years later, she has lost little more than 3 stone. Everyone assumes a gastric band makes losing weight easy. It is what doctors recommend after everything else has failed. But is such drastic mutilation of the digestive system really the answer?

Law, 44, who lives in a quiet Bedfordshire village, is a British everywoman. She has two children, Natasha, 9, and Alex, 7. After 13 years of marriage and much soul-searching, she has recently separated from her husband, Jason, who runs his own successful software-design business.

Her trajectory into weight gain will be familiar to millions. She was a fit and active teenager, a gym devotee and keen swimmer. By her mid-twenties she had become a software trainer, travelling the country in her company car. Exercise dwindled to walking from her hotel room to the breakfast buffet, or from car to curry house when she was meeting friends at weekends.

For her wedding she struggled to get into a size-20 dress, but after the birth of her second child, determined to regain control of her body, she joined a slimming club and began to shed the excess pounds. Then disaster struck: 18-month-old Alex, who was already showing signs of autism, suffered a stroke as a complication of chickenpox. His life was saved, but he has been left with a debilitating weakness down one side of his body and requires constant care. (Law is supported by the National Autistic Society and the charity HemiHelp.)

Stress, anxiety and an almost total lack of opportunity to exercise meant that by the summer of 2006, Law’s weight had rocketed. At 5ft 10in, her body mass index (BMI) had reached 40. She was almost twice the healthy weight for her height, which left her at risk of dying from diabetes, heart disease and cancer, not to mention debilitating pain from arthritis in joints inflamed by the relentless burden of supporting her excessive weight. She also had fibromyalgia, an intense form of muscular pain.

“I was addicted to food,” she declares – an admission that will strike a chord with Britain’s burgeoning population of overweight people.

It is now acknowledged that becoming obese generally has little to do with slow metabolism, heavy bones or the emergence of an alarming genetic trend. But what causes this addiction, and what to do about it, are the most urgent social and economic questions of the age.

Nearly one in four British people is at least double the healthy weight for their height. The numbers are rising faster than anywhere else in Europe, and if the trend continues, more than half the UK’s adults will be obese by 2050, with attendant healthcare and social costs estimated at more than £40 billion a year. The government has described it as the most significant public and personal health challenge facing our society.

In a soul-baring photo diary lasting more than two years, Nikki Law, together with the photographer Tina Stallard, recorded the highs and lows of her food fight. It begins in July 2006, before the operation. Extracts appear below.

NIKKI’S DIARY

July 2006

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