February 13 2006: Tyra Banks has become an instant heroine on both sides of the Atlantic for standing up to the Fat Police who are increasingly looking to stifle the highly confused obesity and weight loss debate with their stranglehold of moralism.

But the big story on weight at the moment is the one that you barely hear about, far removed from the rarefied existence of supermodels – the real news is the quiet collapse of all those millions of New Year Resolutions into fresh defeat, frustration, despair and redoubled guilt. I am meeting or communicating with these people daily in droves.

It will all happen again towards the middle to end of the summer and so the twice yearly cycle (for some it's much, much more frequent) continues year on year, with barely a murmur and only the quiet, private groans of those trapped in the Dieting Madness.

It's a failure of hopelessly ungrounded aspirations and a reliance on willpower, which is something meant to be capable of rolling off the pounds and keeping them off for ever. It can't work like that. Willpower does exist but it is something which is extremely temporary and can only be called upon in times of absolute desperation.

The classic example is the case of a small women lifting a car off a trapped child. Willpower doesn't work as a permanent buffer against life's sharp edges. It can't blunt emotional, cultural and commercial pressures to eat. It can't guard against the perceived need to be in the ever-present Great Game of Dieting or otherwise risk being a nobody through being left out.

So the false promises of just one more fad diet seduce you. What the cynical roman poet Catullus wrote 2,000 years ago about an untrusted lover's promises might just have well been about every commercial diet ever devised - “What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written on the winds and on fast-flowing water.”