Gok Wan Weighs Into Child Obesity Debate

I had always thought of Gok Wan as being a proto-type Channel 4 TV presenter, who'd arrived on our screens from some kind of top-secret factory churning out edgy and attractive individuals from spare parts. Not that I'd paid him much attention before, sure he's personable and disarming enough, but I always thought he'd fade from view after the novelty of getting women to strip off and be damned had worn off.

So it was a big suprise to me that he was previously a huge, gorging teen who weighed an incredible 21 stone. If you dwell on those figures, you will work out that Gok could have weighed as much as three other teens and twice as much as most adults. Today with his trademark glasses, impecable grooming and what can only be described as snake hips, it's impossible to think of Gok other than a fast rising celebrity and I think he was a great choice to present "Too Fat Too Young". I think Channel 4 also showed wisdom in including obesity in their series, the Great British Food Fight.

Inspired and eye-opening as this was, I'm not sure that Gok found what he was looking for and he was also maddeningly vague about the way he lost almost half of his body weight which just seemed to drop off in a matter of months.

I think we need to see more of him in this role and I hope he's working on another series of programmes concentrating on how obese young people can turn their lives around by taking control of their weight. I'm not confident that this will happen though, as programme makers require a quick beginning, middle and happy end all in the course of a half hour programme and the obesity crisis will take a lot longer than that to sort out.