Bad news for people trying to lose weight. A new assessment of how the body responds to dieting shows that it is about twice as difficult as previously thought to shed fat.

Acute little naked baby is grinning at the camera. "Is this the happiest she'll ever be about her appearance?" asks the slogan on the billboard. The ad was for a campaign last year to save future generations of women and girls from hating their bodies. For the explosion in cosmetic surgery – and the explosion of breast implants inside women's bodies – is just a symptom of a corrosive unhappiness that begins only a few years after birth.

Fad diets are nothing new – people have been following them for two millennia. A look back on 20 centuries of bingeing, purging, snake oil and strange ideas

New Year Honours: Unsung Heroes

The early indications are that Tony McCoy should be sidelined for around a fortnight after being sent to hospital yesterday with suspected rib fractures, sustained in a fall at Taunton.

Ever since we witnessed the dispiriting sight of mothers feeding their children takeaway burgers through the fence on a Jamie Oliver show, school dinners have become political.

Don't rush to applaud fast food restaurants for displaying calorie counts on their Big Macmenus. This move, which comes as part of a deal between the Government and the food industry, might look enlightened, but it is no more than a marketing ploy that will yield no rewards for the nation's health.

Dieting is harder than you think. If you cut out a chocolate bar each day you will lose only one-third of the weight that experts had thought. For decades, doctors have based their advice to those who want to lose weight on the assumption that cutting 500 calories a day will see the weight fall off at the rate of 1lb a week.

People who are fat and fit live just as long as their slim counterparts and are less likely to die from heart disease, according to a new study.

A toddler has drowned in the swimming pool of a health club, police confirmed today.

The search for a drug-based solution to the problem of obesity faces a common difficulty – if the treatment is safe it is not effective, and if it is effective it is not safe.

The archetypal overweight woman is between 45 and 54, has been married for 20 years, weighs 13st 3lbs, wears size 18, and experiences humiliation every day.