Yesterday’s Daily Mail revealed that the Russian billionaire and owner of Chelsea football club, Roman Abramovich, has hired an acupuncturist to lose weight. This is a man who is so rich he could live off caviar and quails eggs if he chose to. But he has opted for wandering around with a needle sticking out of his left ear. Well Roman, I’ll give you some advice, and I won’t even ask for any of your £11 billion fortune in return. You don’t need needles; you just need to stop living in England.

I moved to France six years ago and just got back from a two-week holiday in England and Scotland yesterday. It was the first time I had been back for any length of time since we moved. I was five days into my holiday when I noticed something disturbing was happening to my jeans. They seemed to have shrunk without being washed.

Then my youngest daughter (aged five) solved the mystery.

“Mummy, why does your tummy look like a bouncy castle?” she asked. The problem was not my jeans, the problem was me. I had put on weight by doing nothing at all apart from eating a normal British diet. I don’t know why I was surprised. The first thing I noticed when we got off the plane at Bristol was that everyone in England seemed to have doubled in size. It was a case of ‘spot the person who is not clinically obese’. Even my children noticed. Unfortunately we had arrived in the middle of the heat-wave so not only were the people around us fat, they were practically naked.

Now call me old-fashioned, but while I find the six-pack quite a pleasant thing to look at, I find the six rolls of fat spilling over the Englishman’s hipster jeans really quite disgusting. Some of the examples of flesh were beyond description in a family newspaper. I felt like going up to one or two of them and asking if they possessed a mirror. And if so, would they mind using it before they went out next time?

My mother drove us to her house via the supermarket and it was here I discovered the root of the problem. I could not believe the utter rubbish stocked that passes as food. I was hard pressed to find anything I wanted to eat at all among all the processed junk. Why on earth would you eat something that calls itself a cheestrings and claims to be 100% cheese but comes in foil packet? Why not just eat a piece of cheese? And what on earth would possess any sane mother to feed it to her children? And what does your average British mother think is a good idea for lunch? According to a check-out girl I spoke to at Tescos in Tiverton it is frozen pizzas, chicken nuggets, chips and coca-cola.

“The fatter they are, the more junk they have in their trolleys,” she told me.

The government may be pushing for healthier living and preparing legislation for us to become better eaters but what is really needed is a change in attitude rather than legislation. People in England just don’t seem to understand the old adage that ‘you are what you eat.’ The fact is if you stuff your face with greasy chips and processed foods you’re going to end up pale, spotty and fat as well as feeling pretty grotty. And even more scarily if we don’t stop feeding our children this rubbish we’re going to have an ever-increasing delinquency problem. It’s so blindingly obvious to me that if you feed children poison they turn out to be poisonous.

I was amazed driving around Devon at the amount of greasy spoons and fish bars there still are. The typical menu in these establishments is chips, beans and greasy meat, topped with fried onions, all of which has been fried in oil that has been re-boiled umpteen times. You could smell some of these places at 50 paces. Just the stench was enough to put me off, but I think that if you’re immersed in this unhealthy eating cycle it just goes on and on. You just don’t realise how disgusting it is until you’ve stopped eating it, rather like a smoker doesn’t smell smoke until he’s given up smoking.

I was also amazed wandering around the glorious country lanes in deepest Devon to find them filled with litter. What possesses someone to eat a Pot Noodle is beyond me, but to then throw it out of the car window is compounding the crime. In fact I would find it easier to forgive if they’d thrown it out of the window before they’d eaten it.

“Look,” said my mother sniffily picking up the eighth packet of pickled onion flavour Monster Munches we’d seen on the walk. “It’s the kind of people who eat this rubbish that think it’s OK to litter the countryside.”

Up to a point. A very close friend of mine shocked the hell out of me when I went to stay with her in Wiltshire last week. Here in the land of the deep-fried Mars Bar it is not hard to understand why the rate of premature mortality from obesity is the highest in the UK. At one point we saw a classic fatty wandering down the road clutching two loaves of Mothers Pride, her bats wings (fat under the arms, really attractive) swinging. I hate Mothers Pride, to me it’s like eating soggy cardboard. Shockingly it is the fourth best-selling bread in the UK.

“You see,” I said turning to my friend. “She’s going to stuff herself with that bread and probably some ghastly sugary jam. As there’s no nutritional value in it she’ll be hungry in half an hour and then probably eat fourteen crumpets before dinner. No wonder she’s so fat.”

It was only later on as we prepared sandwiches to eat on a picnic that my friend’s dirty secret came out of the bread bin. Mothers Pride. Obviously I packed my bags immediately.

The news that the NHS is going to have to start building reinforced beds in order to cope with obese patients is like a bad joke. The fact that some of these people are now too fat to fit into medical scanners or normal beds is unsurprising. If they weren’t so fat they probably wouldn’t be in hospital in the first place.

Apparently your average British male spends £1144 a year cultivating his beer belly by drinking beer and eating post-boozing snacks like kebabs. Never mind the humiliation of losing the World Cup. Even worse were the British beer bellies paraded on global television for all the world to laugh at. Can I just say guys; you’ve spent enough money on them now. Most of your bellies are bigger than mine was at nine months pregnant and it’s just not a good look.

A friend of mine who lives in France says he has to take a sick-bag to the beach now the tourist season has begun.

“The sight of red British flesh bulging out of cheap swimwear is too disgusting for words,” he says. “And the worst are what I call the ‘junior porkies’. There is no excuse for obesity aged 11; it just didn’t happen in my day.”

I’m not the only one to find a trip to Britain bad for the waistline. Chantal Thomass, one of France’s leading underwear designers, has a factory in Norfolk that she visits once every couple of months.

“Without fail, I put on weight every time I go to England,” she told me. “I come back to Paris and go on an immediate diet.”

I’m not suggesting Roman and the rest of you move to France. There is an alternative.

You don’t need needles or anti-obesity pills or the government telling you what to eat and how to live. You just need to stop eating food or drinking drinks that have no nutritional value. Go for water instead of some sugary processed liquid that I wouldn’t even use to take my nail varnish off with and for fresh food every time. Think olives and not crisps; brown bread not white and don’t even touch a processed meal with your acupuncture needle.