I THOUGHT I must have missed a vital word or two when I read what the popstar Beyonce Knowles had for lunch.

On re-reading it, I realised why her preposterous lunch should be of any relevance to the rest of us.

Four slices of cucumber and six slices of tomato - mere, pointless tatters - constituted a complete lunch menu for Beyonce. At that rate, her hair and platform shoes must be the heaviest things on her. Apparently, she is so worried about looking fat on stage that morsels of veg were all she could trust to keep her looking slinky.

Reading on, I found she was being told off for it by moral patricians (undoubtedly as fat as dinner ladies) who thought she was setting a bad example to young, impressionable wannabes who were supposedly being 'groomed' into acquiring eating disorders.

Never mind them, I thought, what about the poor hungry girl, let's talk about her discomfort first, ideally over a nice hearty meal. But, despite my motherly concern for the star with the big voice and the wee menus, I was slightly contemptuous of her apparently vain desire to look fabulous above her desire for a full, contented belly.

I was about to vent my fury on this silly girl's endorsement of self-destructive body images, like the fat patricians had done in the article, when I realised my own hypocrisy.

Sitting at my desk, I was gnawing at a flavourless rice cake, which could easily have doubled as a styrofoam ceiling tile, all in the name of fitting into my size ten suction trousers by the weekend, when I would doubtless have a chocolate and chips blow-out and be busting out of my pants by Sunday night.

Worse still was what my sisters at the office were tucking into for lunch. One was munching her way through a bag of carrots like a sad old horse, while another was unwrapping a two-dimensional plate of Weight Watchers macaroni cheese (with no cheese or macaroni in sight), with what seemed like tears in her eyes. Another, I am sure, had some sliced vegetables in front of her.

Has it really come to this? What kind of madness is it when women are starving themselves, yet one in five in Britain is now obese? So obese in fact, that the NHS is considering the use of injections which will suppress the ever-expanding appetites of people who eat sliced vegetables for lunch and ceiling tiles for tea. I don't think the spiral of food deprivation and bingeing can be solved through handy daily injections. It's a case of needing our heads, not our stomachs, thoroughly examined.