Quotes from Arabella Weir

I don't think I've got the expertise with which to nit-pick, and I freely admit that my motivation to support charities has been emotional, rather than as a result of being particularly well informed as to how the money is used.

In the 20 long, hungry years between my late teens and late 30s I bought in to virtually every new diet and/or exercise regime that hoved into view, particularly at this most vulnerable time for those of us prone to poor body image - a new year.

If, however, you have richer pursuits in mind and know that no woman should be judged by how she looks - that everything she brings to the party is more important than the size of her arse - then refuse to be sucked into the never ending whirligig of self-doubting, self-hating madness that is stop-start dieting and crazy new exercise regimes.

When not eating, I like shopping; although I'm afraid I've become a bit of a cliche.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

My dad was a diplomat and after living in America, where I was born, he was posted to Cairo.

Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat.

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

As I was growing up, it was made clear that the fat me wasn't welcome, that a thin person was expected and awaited, and impatiently so.

I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.

When popularity is your only goal, doing well in class is going to feature very low, if at all, on your priority list.

My parents' generation's benchmark was simple: Fat Equals Bad.

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.

As an actress and comedienne, I'm a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of 'Twelfth Night' there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?

If there's one thing I know, it's this - everybody thinks somebody else is having a better life.

Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.

I have never done a package tour in my life. It appeals in a way, but then I remind myself that you can't control the other people with you, which could turn out to be ghastly.

Sending your child off to school for the first time in their life is terrifying.

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.

Success, in whatever form it takes, is a tricky thing - once you've achieved your goal, then what? Where do you aim?

I know a lot of people fear the rougher types who might be at a state school, but surely it is better to know who they are and how to deal with them than for that kind of child to appear as a completely different species to yours.

If one's honest about it, spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.