Every Tuesday, Britain's leading nutritionist explains how to eat your way to health. This week, Jane offers advice to a woman who thinks her big appetite is genetic and tackles the benefits of spinach and kale

 

I am a 40-year-old working mother with a busy and, at times, haphazard routine. I am also obese, at 13st 9lb, yet in my 20s I was 9st. I find it difficult to manage what to eat and when. I'm satisfied with cereal and a banana for breakfast, but by 12.30pm I'm ravenous and could eat a cow. On a bad day I consume 3,000 calories and on a good day it's 1,800 to 2,000. I thinkmy big appetite is genetic because my aunt and mother were slim in their 20s, but obese by 35. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Your family's eating habits could be partly to blame. Habits such as comfort eating can be passed down from one generation to another. So it's not so much a genetic thing that you can't do anything about, more that there is a familial tendency.

Martin Brook received the best possible Christmas gift - he was cured of diabetes.

In early December, he had gone into hospital for a last ditch attempt to deal with his weight problem.

He was morbidly obese, weighing more than 23st, and had an advanced case of type 2 diabetes. Every day he had to inject himself four times with a huge dose of insulin.

The operation, known as a gastric bypass, involves drastic replumbing. The surgeon reduces the size of your stomach and then creates a bypass.

This means food avoids the rest of your stomach and a portion of your small intestine, entering the guts lower down. Not only do you end up eating far less, but you also absorb fewer calories.

The weight loss effect is not expected to kick in for a few weeks, but the day after the operation something remarkable had happened to Martin.

"I needed only 15 units of insulin instead of 130 to control my blood sugar levels," says the father-of-three from London. "I could hardly believe it.

Everything about the untimely death of Heath Ledger is disturbing.

 

The loss of a talented and handsome actor who was just reaching his prime. The increasingly likely scenario that this was not suicide, but a tragic accident.

And, of course, the fact that a two-year-old girl has lost her daddy - a little girl so young she was innocently smiling in last week's snatched paparazzi pictures, unaware of what had happened.

To me, however, one detail in the account of Heath Ledger's final weeks was particularly and personally chilling, the actor's description of his intractable insomnia.

"Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night," he told an interviewer last November. "I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted and my mind was still going."

I didn't have to hear his voice to guess the weariness and desperation behind his words - the torture of a body that is craving rest but a mind that simply won't allow it.