Putting the best face on an obsession

Should we be alarmed? There are more horrific things in the world. The idea of working on the self to make ourselves better is good, even if my idea of better may be different from the Body Work ideals. And sometimes makeovers serve a purpose. You are What You Eat is another Thursday night makeover show. It's produced by Britain's Channel 4 and repackaged by Channel 9 with an Australian voiceover; now that's strange.

It stars a scrawny Scottish nutritionist, Gillian McKeith, who bullies her victims into eating better. Last week's was a lovely young Welsh boyo who adored cheese and weighed 165kg. Rob is a "perpetual eating machine". To make it graphic, which is the name of this game, McKeith lays out all the food he eats in a week. "I can't believe I stuck that down my gob," Rob says. The next tactic is even harder to swallow. She gives Rob a bucket of fat: the equivalent of the 6kg he eats in a month. He then has to put it through a mincer so we can see what it does to his veins. Tasty.

Even less palatable is the on-air testing of Rob's poo. McKeith's methods have drawn ire from The Guardian's Bad Science columnist, who publicised that allegedly her PhD is from a non-accredited correspondence course where you get a discount for buying two degrees. In other words, it's hardly science but the result left Rob lighter, if not happier. He learned to like fish and he felt better.

Makeover culture is a bit rich and certainly lines the pockets of the unscrupulous and often under-qualified: it turns out anyone with a medical degree can put up a plaque calling themselves a cosmetic surgeon, whereas plastic surgery requires years of training. But is it bad? And what type of critique can we offer?

I'm not into condemning the choices individuals make. While I'm not going to shell out the big bucks for a nose job, I think I will just pop down and get a facial. Oh, and maybe an airbrushed photograph.