Fiona Fullerton's battle to stay slim

Dieting is an obsession shared by millions of people - not just the ones who are overweight. Even slim people, particularly women, spend their lives with their weight 'yo-yo-ing' up and down, using one 'fad' diet after another. They often end up far heavier than when they started. Actress and Bond Girl Fiona Fullerton, yo-yo dieted for several hard years when she felt she was under immense pressure to be a thin starlet.

"I suppose in my twenties my weight fluctuated only minimally - I was always fairly slim. But it was really in 1993, when I was living in Los Angeles, that my weight became a problem," she recalls.

"Through massive lack of self esteem and lack of confidence - and living in a strange city and being hugely homesick - I started to eat, but in quite an alarming way. I was in a way completely crucifying the way I looked by putting on huge amounts of weight."

Huge mistake

When Fiona returned to the UK she sought help from a special clinic in central London. It put her on a rapid weight-loss diet. She was given a series of injections and took pills. Looking back, she realises it was a huge mistake.

"They do guarantee that you will lose a stone in three weeks - and it worked, I lost the weight - but of course as soon as you stop this rather bizarre diet, you put the weight back on immediately." At the time, however, it seemed an attractive way of dealing with her problems, even though her body was suffering as a result.

"I did have about three or four years of yo-yo-ing up and down from eight stone - which is quite low for me - to sometimes 10 and a half stone and then back to nine stone. It was just extraordinary, and it's not good for your skin because your skin is stretching to accommodate the fat and then shrinking again when you get thin."

Fortunately for Fiona - who played the Russian spy Pola Ivanova in A View To A Kill with Roger Moore - she eventually managed to break the cycle. The catalyst for change was meeting her husband in 1994 and having a child.

"Since then, things have been a great deal more stable in all aspects of my life. I feel a great deal happier for the first time in my life; the stability is there and therefore my weight has stabilised as well. It's quite interesting how that happens."

The health dangers associated with yo-yo diets

BBC Local Radio is running a series of information items as part of the Taking Shape campaign. Yo-yo dieting is one of the subjects being discussed.