Making the right food choices is never easy. And a month after Christmas, I am sure a fair number of us are still regretting eating quite as much as we did over the festive period.
The question of what to do about it is complicated by the avalanche of conflicting messages from food companies, dieticians, and politicians.
The Department of Health recently shelled out £329,000 on a new campaign for the new year that is meant to encourage us to eat more healthily. A video starring Ainsley Harriott was commissioned at the cost of £22,000 and put on YouTube. One imagines that a mandarin in the bowels of Whitehall thought this represented the height of cool.
Unfortunately, so few people have watched the video, the current price per view is over £8.00. Not exactly value for money in anyone's book.
The other aspect of the campaign was to provide healthy recipe cards to be handed out at supermarkets.
This has led to accusations that the government is forking out taxpayers' money for the benefit of supermarkets. I don't think it's appropriate to criticise the supermarkets at this point. After all, they are in business to supply consumers with what they want.
But what the Department of Health's campaign has demonstrated clearly is that government has very little idea how to alter consumer behaviour.
And while health officials parade Ainsley Harriott for our collective benefit, the lack of a coherent strategy for promoting healthy eating is perfectly illustrated by a proposal by NHS officials in Oxfordshire to remove gluten-free bread from prescription.
Anyone who suffers from a gluten intolerance (coeliac disease) can suffer a violently unpleasant reaction should they eat certain things like wheat and barley. Symptoms are often sufficiently severe (for example, bloating and stomach cramps) to render that person incapacitated. If the preventative measure to avoid a gluten-induced reaction took the form of a pill, then its availability on prescription wouldn't be an issue. But because the preventative medicine takes the form of a foodstuff, it is treated differently.
The Foods Standards Authority estimates that over 5,000 people in the UK are hospitalised every year because of coeliac disease at a huge cost to the NHS. Removing gluten-free bread - a staple foodstuff - from prescription is not going to help. And because gluten-free food tends to be a little bit more expensive than mass-market products, any decision to remove it from prescription is going to be particularly felt by those on lower incomes.
The whole drive towards encouraging healthy eating is simply because obesity prevention is cheaper than obesity cure. So it is puzzling that there seems to be ample money available to pay for Ainsley Harriott at a time when an NHS Trust is contemplating the removal of a vital prescription for coeliacs.
Eating the right things is about so much more than maintaining the right weight. It is about time policymakers fully digested that fact.