Britain has an underground world of desperate women who stash away junk food and bolt it down in secret, reveals a new survey

The survey, from a brand new magazine LighterLife, exposes a community of guilt-ridden women who lie to their families about how much they eat and will even throw away food because they can’t trust themselves not to eat it.

The magazine commissioned BMRB to ask 1142 women, nationally representative, if they had attempted to lose weight, and 61 per cent – 693 - said they had. Their confessions make disturbing reading.

They reveal women who’d rather have chocolate or a takeaway than sex. Many are serial dieters, yet abandon their efforts after a week. They’re an alienated, unsupported community, some of whom would rather deceive their own children than give up food.

The figures show that:

• Almost one in five women who have attempted to lose weight have hidden food or eaten it in secret. They stash it in their car, bathroom cupboards, under their bed, and even in their children’s rooms. And some resort to eating secret supplies in the bath, bathroom or the car.
• To protect their double life, women seemingly have to create a web of deceit. A quarter of dieters lie about what they have eaten, and 54 per cent of these have done so to partners. One in 10 have even lied to their children.
• They hide the truth because they’re ashamed, fear a lecture, and sometimes simply because they don’t want to share the food with their family.
• Many women struggle to stick to a diet. A half say their shortest diets lasted a week or even less; a fifth have dieted at least 11 times; and a quarter have thrown food away just to stop themselves eating it.
• Thirty one per cent of dieting women admitted they had preferred food to sex. Of these, 50 per cent would opt for chocolate, while others would prefer takeaways, crisps and cakes.

This is perhaps unsurprising, says the magazine, when women say their men are trying to sabotage their diets – "some men even try to fatten women up to ensure they don’t leave them."

Fifteen per cent believed partners encouraged them to eat more (and 11 per cent thought their family were up to the same trick, while eight per cent said friends were trying to ruin their diet).

Bar Hewlett, founder of the weight loss specialist company LighterLife, which is launching the magazine, said the saboteurs buy the wrong food, tempt dieters by eating in front of them, and even make them feel guilty.

She said: "This confirms our own experience of men who fear the ‘new you’ – of someone who emerges confident, assertive and beautiful after successful weight loss. They’re scared a woman will leave them if they don’t ‘up their game’, and believe they won’t be able to ‘control’ them when they’re thin. It’s a matter of ‘when she was fat she did what I told her’. So they’ll do things like surprise their wife with a romantic meal, when all they want her to do is put on weight, and so control her."

"One of the main problems is that women focus too much on cutting down on calories to lose weight. The secret of losing weight and keeping it off is resolving the emotional issues that encourage you to overeat in the first place, and having support from people in the same position and professional counsellors."

"Learning to distinguish between physical hunger and emotional hunger is absolutely key to staying slim. And it’s even more important when you consider that nine out of 10 women who lose weight with a traditional diet put it back on a year later."