Diet Junkies/BBC2, Tuesday 8.00 p.m: If you're still on that New Year diet, hang in there. This new series, which looks at the 50-year old diet industry, is definitely for you. The opening show explored the idea of the diet "guru" which started in the early 1960s and continues today.
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the first diet guru to feature was Dr Robert Atkins from 1961 whose diet was sold as a miracle cure to a gullible American public. Atkins used the media very cleverly and got Hollywood stars interested. His diet featured in Vogue magazine and started off nearly 50 years of obsession with weight and body image.
At the time, the attitude to obese people was as awful as it is today. Before this, jaw wiring, quacks, lectures from your GP and amphetamine (speed) prescriptions were the only alternatives. Before Atkins, there was a whole generation of women who were off their heads on speed. Some health "experts" tried to warn people off the Atkins diet and pointed out the diet was bad for your health; the solution to obesity was ridiculously simple - eat less and take more exercise - and 99 per cent of people on Atkins put the weight back on within two years. No one listened. People wanted miracles and quick results.
Weight Watchers started in 1967 in a village in England. Some of the clips from these early Weight Watchers classes really left me wondering if we have lost the plot altogether when it comes to food. Participants signed up to being ritually humiliated and exposed in front of others. The programme noted Weight Watchers has actually never published its success rates.
By the early 70s, Atkins had been crucified by the medical profession in America and people were sent down the "low-fat" road. This lasted for the next 20 years.
Other guru regimes described were: the Beverly Hills Diet which consisted of 10 days fruit followed by binge eating; the Jane Fonda exercise video; the religious "Weigh Down Workshops"; and Scare Tactics, such as showing people horrible plastic yellow lumps as a way of helping them to motivate themselves.
However, the fact that Jane Fonda suffered from bulimia for 30 years and the proponent of the Beverly Hills diet has an advanced case of "dowagers hump" (osteoporosis of the spine, brought about by her continuous fruit/binge regime) is not encouraging.
After two decades of low-fat and video workouts, we were ready for the second coming of Atkins. His diet is still one of the most popular, although the jury is still out on the long-term effects.
There were some sad case histories, for example, the man who had his jaws wired and resorted to liquidising his food because he was so hungry and Cass Elliot of the Mommas and Poppas group who was fat and pretended to love it. However, she died at 33 from a heart attack, which resulted from her secret starvation/gluttonous diet regime.
The evidence presented in the programme shows all of the diets have one thing in common; none of them work.
In Ireland, we are fast catching up with America in terms of obesity, with 34 per cent of us now overweight and one in seven of us clinically obese. New evidence shows that it is not what we eat but portion size that counts and that our increased stress levels have a lot to do with it. Stress causes metabolic changes that promote weight gain.
We are fat and frightened, not greedy.
The programme ended with the question - does it have to be this hard for something that is so ridiculously simple?
Next week, the programme looks at why "diet" foods make us fat and why we are spending millions on slimming food products to no avail.