Her mother had started the nickname, back when she was about seven. With a fuzz of fluffy blonde hair, round blue eyes and – yes, okay – endearingly protruding front teeth, the affectionate ‘My little bunny’ soon became ‘Bunny’ or ‘Bun’. Little Rachel would twitch her nose obligingly, just like a real rabbit, and it made her mum laugh and ruffle her hair. Bunnies were so cute! Who wouldn’t want to be called that, anyway? The pet name stuck, for years and years, until she was a self-conscious teenager and suddenly would rather die than stand out from the crowd in any way, let alone with a seriously uncool name. And so ‘Bunny’ went, along with the goofy teeth (thanks to the local orthodontist) and she was Rachel again, ordinary Rachel with spots and a tendency to blush; Rachel who was good at netball and swimming, popular with both girls and boys. She had breezed through school and college and her first couple of jobs, until . . .

Well. There was no need to go into how she’d fallen for charming Mark Roberts and how everything ended up going wrong. Especially not now, when she was standing in front of a room full of people waiting for her to begin.

She tapped the microphone, took a deep breath and then gave them all her best and brightest smile. One more time, with feeling. ‘Good evening, everyone. My name is Bunny Halliday, and I’m delighted to say that nine months ago I was voted SlimmerYou’s ‘Slimmer of the Year’, having lost almost ten stone!’

Cue a generously thunderous round of applause.

‘This was me, three years ago,’ she said, gesturing to her portly cardboard twin, propped up beside her. ‘There I am, with that big old smile on my face. Doesn’t she look happy? you might be thinking. But no. Deep down inside, I was not happy. I was bingeing on ice-cream and biscuits. I would think nothing of eating a family-size pizza all to myself for dinner, along with chips, onion rings, chicken wings . . . the lot. Side orders don’t count, right?’

A few smiles of acknowledgement greeted this comment, and she went on, emboldened.

‘So no, I was not happy. I slept badly and had very little energy. The thought of doing any exercise was just so embarrassing, I couldn’t face it. Swimming at the local pool, where I’d have to wobble along, thighs quaking, to the edge of the water? Forget it. Go jogging around my local streets to be smirked at by teenagers or, worse, overtaken by pensioners on mobility scooters? No, thanks. It was all I could do to wheeze my way into the kitchen for another snack and then back to the sofa to watch telly. Even that felt like an effort.’