Weightwatchers: they're fat – not fat-headed

This week it launched its ''revolutionary'' ProPoints plan and its representatives took to the airwaves to proclaim it a breakthrough based on recent research. Even Little Britain's Marjorie Dawes, the doyenne of Fatfighters, couldn't have drawn in gullible dieters more effectively.

But what exactly is new about it? It seems to me that WW has simply refried and repackaged the tried and tested GI (glycaemic index) regime, that was developed by Dr David Jenkins and colleagues at the University of Toronto in 1980 in the course of research into diabetes. They calculated that slow-burning low GI foods release glucose into the body slowly and steadily, staving off hunger.

Let me say that the GI diet certainly works, but it is the least commercial of regimes – and by far the most sensible. It eschews refined carbohydrate, the larder's most addictive ingredient, and advocates eating the wholefoods that human beings were designed to take their energy from.

Cutting out bad carbs and eating good, slow-burning ones (pulses, fruit, vegetables) along with lean protein quells the hunger pangs, and that's – er – about it. But no. WeightWatchers wants to enslave you to its membership so it can repeat this, week in week out, and bait you into buying special ''Points'' calculators, a "filling foods highlighter pen" at £1.50 (enlighten me, please?) pedometers, low-fat fish and chips – OK I made the last one up…

I am a WeightWatchers fugitive, escaping its clutches after a four-month membership. I had joined about five years after my children were born, having ballooned on eating teatime leftovers in conjunction with a job that involved frequent food and wine forays.

Our weekly meetings in a primary school hall were unintentionally comic, due mostly to the size of the chairs – you needed two, one for each cheek, so to speak. At the end of the weighing session and a lecture about the blessed Points, we sat spread across our many chairs to 'fess up the previous days' tumbles from the wagon. Trouble is that even in the most earnest solemnities, people are very funny.

Our catastrophes ranged from inexplicable failures of self-navigation such as walking into bakeries and chip shops, not past them; and choosing foie gras off a menu, although we couldn't find it in the Points calculator, to remembering, half way through a pain au chocolat, that we were on a diet.

This was the human side of being in a diet club – and our helpless church giggling only served as a reminder of the misery of our enforced deprivation. And that's the point. Unless we feel full – which I never did on the low-calorie philosophy of the previous WW plan – we are unhappy. And what do most of us want when we are unhappy? For me, it's straight to the trough.

It wasn't until three years after giving up my membership, that I saw the light and changed the way I ate after hearing about the GI diet and adapting it to suit.

I consumed a seed-packed muesli each morning, ate lots of good carbs such as lentils, and potatoes only with their skins on. I had meat, fish, eggs, and toast once a week, and I drank less wine. But I put butter on my vegetables, drank full-fat milk and yoghurt. I learnt the simple lesson that sugar is an addictive drug, but when it is not in your system, the cravings for it are not physical and therefore easier to bat away. I lost 2½ stone and it has mostly stayed off. Regular exercise, of course, plays its part.

Yet 30 years after the GI diet was introduced to the world, we have WeightWatchers talking about innovation, and discovery.

Come off it. I would argue that WeightWatchers have come to this conclusion having witnessed tens of thousands of people losing weight through the GI philosophy.

There is nothing fundamentally new about this latest plan, it's just an overprocessed salad dressing.