The FP brings you a regular digest of forward thinking and truth about why you really can’t stop overeating

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I got a text last night from a friend saying: “You must watch Channel 4 now! Jamie Oliver is about to cut up a dead body to see why unhealthy eating kills!”

As it happens, I’d just switched channels from C4 after watching Jamie pour some cooking oil over a woman in a wet suit lying in a bath – a useless and pointless illustration of how much fat she eats in five years. I was getting annoyed and I felt I’d rather get depressed by watching the news than have to look at both publicity hungry celebrity chef Jamie and a corpse on my screen at the same time.

Jamie Oliver has done some good things. His School Dinners programme was excellent, as he did introduce some variation to school kids who had been brought up thinking that the only food that exists is chips. His programme about chickens last week was admirable and he is definitely the most talented celeb chef on our screens at the moment – his cooking is outstanding.

But all he has achieved by last night’s clumsy programme, Jamie Oliver: Eat To Save Your Life, is to drive more people towards consuming the food he was advising against.

I can imagine how the programme was conceived: “Yeah and we could get the fat woman to wear a wet suit and we could smear her in lard.”

“Great idea!”

“Thanks. What about you? Any ideas?”

“Yeah, we need something shocking - how about we exhume a corpse?”

All this gets passed on to Jamie via his publicity agent – Jamie who knows less about the psychology of compulsive overeating than the average magazine-educated shop assistant (this is not a derogatory statement as readers of popular women's magazines are given so much diet advice that most of them have the equivalent of a degree in nutrition!). The programme gets made and the public sucks it all in. The trick behind the programme is that its sensationalist content magically blinds the viewers into not noticing that they’re being served up the same old recycled, rehashed healthy-eating advice that they’ve been forcibly fed for the last 20 years!

Recycled, rehashed information that has been proved over and over again as inefective! There's a reason why the obesity figures rise in parallel with the amount of diet and healthy eating advice that's pumped into the media. The more this type of information is downloaded into your brain the more difficulty you will have in controlling your compulsion to overeat.

If you’re not a compulsive eater, then fair enough, but more and more of us are losing control BECAUSE of this type of advice.

I challenge you to try to stick to Jamie’s advice and I also challenge you to tell me how and why it’s any different to the way you’ve been trying to eat for the whole of your adult life – a way of eating that has led you to living on a hamster wheel of yo-yo dieting and loss of control over food, years of weight loss and inevitable weight gain and led you further and further into the overeating trap.

Go on, go away and start your healthy eating regime. Then when you’re up in the middle of the night with your head in the fridge, face first into a Black Forest gateaux that you don’t even like, then think about how you wouldn’t be doing that if you hadn’t tried to follow what is essentially just another diet.