I don’t exercise to lose weight – but if I did, who cares?

I’ve been going to the gym. It’s a nice gym, about a 25-minute walk from my house, but I catch the bus – going to the gym is enough of a workout for me, thanks. A good week sees me visit three times; I do a 30-minute intense cardio class which turns me claret, a 40-minute workout on some fancy-pants machines which leaves me with a damp T-shirt, and an intermediate yoga class which makes me radiate smugness.

Some weeks I can only manage the yoga. I’m good at yoga – though I’d be better if I didn’t have a big roll of tummy fat that gets in the way of certain moves. Sometimes I feel like I’m about to suffocate in my own flesh, for instance when I lie on the mat with my legs over my head and my toes touching the floor behind me, my stomach is like a massive blubbery airbag in my face.

Some people at the gym assume I’m there to lose weight – after all, I must want to? I’ve got a wobbly bum and washerwoman’s arms – but actually, it’s not my main motivation. I’m driven by the simple fact that I don’t want to have a massive coronary and I’d quite like to be able to run for a bus without dry-heaving at the roadside.

Obviously toning up the flab would make exercising more enjoyable; I might be able to do press-ups, for example, without face-planting. Yet as great as it would be to fit into a pair of size 12 jeans again (I’ve got four pairs that haven’t made an appearance since 2011), I’m not prepared to starve myself to do so.

In any case: aren’t diets old hat? When a woman mentioned “burning calories” to me the other day as we left the cardio class, I thought, “Oh, are we still doing that?”

There is something distinctly old-fashioned and anti-feminist about wanting to lose weight in 2020 – and going on a diet is definitely the most frowned-upon way of doing so. In fact, the only person I know who cheerfully admits to being on a diet is one of my best mates, who’s 64 and still doing the January Ryvita routine.

By contrast, a lot of younger people are disguising their dieting under the guide of “clean eating”, by going vegan or gluten/dairy-free. Veganism is an incredibly useful excuse to anyone with an eating disorder, who can then sit in a corner and pretend to eat a handful of nuts

It seems dieting has become something people are so ashamed of doing, they lie about it. Meal replacement company SlimFast has claimed, based on a survey it recently conducted, that out of the 17 million British women currently on a diet, seven million of them will hide that fact from someone.

Dieting in secret has become the norm for high-profile women who don’t want to incur the wrath of the online “body-positive” brigade who will lay into anyone who promotes a weight loss plan, a la Kelly Brook, or dares to leave the fat girls club, like singer Adele, who has shed three stone and now looks nothing like Adele. She looks great, she looked great before, Adele is great. According to social media trolls, however, the thinner Adele looks ill, sickly and no longer “hot”. Women can’t win.

We need some perspective: we can’t be against one kind of body fascism (ie abusing the overweight) only to turn on anyone with the temerity to shed a few pounds.

As a short, middle-aged woman with heart disease in the family, I don’t feel I can afford to get any fatter. I also feel I owe it to the NHS to do my bit. So while I would rather not diet in a punitive kind of way, I do want to make my body stronger and fitter. And if a side effect of taking more exercise means that I shift some blubber, let’s be honest, deep down I’ll be delighted. Weight has a habit of making hypocrites of us all.