Overweight? The moaners make Cheryl furious!

10:07am Friday 14th March 2008

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Sometimes this job leaves you absolutely gob-smacked. Just what should I have been expecting when I was asked to interview a world champion female bodybuilder: a sort of rugby front-row forward with cauliflower ears in a skirt?

Instead, who should turn up but a slim, elegant lady with immaculately coiffured, long, brown hair and piercing pale grey eyes. Not to mention a degree in psychology from Lancaster University.

I should know better now than to pigeon-hole people before we meet - 10 years of writing this column should have left me pretty much inured against surprise. But Cheryl Myers, the female world champion at "natural" bodybuilding - a term I shall explain later - talks more like a philosopher than a muscle-bound athlete.

A lot of what she says makes a great deal more sense than the average nonsense spouted by most politicians these days and she says it with a great good humour.

"Most people who meet me for the first time think I must be something of a freak," she says.

"But I am what I am because I decided to take control of my own body rather than blame other people for my problems."

Proud Barlicker Cheryl - 42, but looking 10 years younger - was, as a child, "big but not obese. "My mother had gone through food shortages during the war and, as a result, served us big portions, a sort of love by generous food," she said. So when she got to that awkward adolescent age she was highly conscious of her "puppy fat" - her phrase - and was determined to do something about it. She had always remembered a programme about male bodybuilders she had seen on TV aged eight and wondered: "Can girls do that?"

As she explained over a glass of diet Coke in Herriot's Hotel, Skipton: "That TV show had left me with a mixture of fascination about the beauty of the human body and at the same time a sense of revulsion. I was an only child and a bit of a loner and just thought that this would be an interesting thing to do to get my body into shape."

She started weight training at West Craven High School in Barnoldswick and continued at university. But it was not until she was back home, and Rolls-Royce threw open its gym to the general public, that she began to meet male bodybuilders - and that's when the "natural" part of her sport comes in.

"Many of those lads were taking all sorts of drugs to put on weight," she went on. "These were dangerous substances like steroids and hormones, generally used without proper medical advice, and they had no idea what harm they were doing to their bodies.

"This idea worried me from the very beginning and that is why I joined the natural' bodybuilding movement, which is strongly against artificial substance abuse. To become registered, you have to take a lie-detector test to swear that you have never used drugs and give a urine sample before any competition.

"This is the hard way of building a beautiful body. You have to train hard four times week and eat a very special diet - lots of chicken, fish, potatoes and rice - and give up things like chocolate and most definitely alcohol.

"In other words, you have to take charge of your own life and work hard at it. It infuriates me when young women these days are constantly moaning about being obese. It is not other people who are stuffing them with chocolate, crisps, hamburgers and booze."

After eight years of hard training, she entered her first competition in Colne Town Hall - and finished fourth out of four.

As in the past, this made her even more determined to succeed. Gradually, she worked her way to national and European championships and then the world championships in New York, which she won in 2006 and retained last year. "That was the first time in 20 years when I had retained one of the titles I had won," she grinned. "Now my aim is to make it third time lucky."

Even her holidays seem like hard work to me: camping with husband Stuart in Scotland's Glencoe, one of the most desolate spots in the UK.

She's already in training at Westy's Gym in Barnoldswick for this autumn's contest, which says something about "taking control of you own body".

Wouldn't it be nice if nanny-state politicians spoke such sound good sense instead of closing down swimming pools and selling off school playing fields. But it might offend obese voters and their children to be told: "It's your own greedy fault."