She wants to decouple nutrition advice from weight loss, to focus on the health benefits that a sensible, long-term eating plan can deliver. But admits that some weight loss – even if it is a “quick fix” – can be motivating. “It can be really empowering to see how quickly your energy, mood, and weight can change through targeted nutrition – but it’s important that you can then move onto something sustainable and consistent. If not, it’s extremely emotional, exhausting and you’re rarely happy with where you are.”

Instead, she advises focusing on the power of nutrition to prevent long-term disease. “We’ve been conditioned to equate diet with weight, so we forget that good nutrition is actually required for a whole host of other (really important) things.”

She gives the example of how eating too much sugar can play havoc with our insulin levels. “In the short term, dysregulated insulin can cause weight gain, anxiety, low immunity, mood fluctuations, inflammation and fatigue. But in the long term, this issue is much more problematic. One in 10 Britons has type two diabetes, a number which has doubled in the last 15 years, and more than 13 million have pre-diabetes or increased risk. The cost of this disease is unsustainable: pre-Covid, 10 per cent of the NHS budget for England and Wales was spent on diabetes. This equates to £1.5 million an hour.”

Experts predict that with the changes in our eating habits and weight gain since the pandemic, this figure is set to rise.

She warns that hyperinsulinemia – higher than normal insulin levels – doesn’t just affect diabetes. “It’s also a risk factor for most of the other chronic diseases; CVD, Alzheimer’s, certain types of cancers and dysfunctional immunity. There needs to be far more focus on how we can try to prevent these diseases developing through good nutrition and fitness practices.”

But Stephenson is positive about the changes we can make to our diet and health outcomes. “It can take up to 10 years to progress to full-blown disease, which means we have the power to intervene and take control of our health long before it gets out of control,” she says. “That would be transformational not only on a personal level for our enjoyment of life and health span, but also for the economy.”

But how do we turn around our eating habits? “My advice to people looking to improve their health is to start with small, incremental changes that fit into your daily life,” Dr Andreas Michaelides, chief of psychology at Noom, an app that uses a psychology-based approach to change your eating habits, says. “Realistic, achievable goals are more likely to help you build long-term, sustainable habits.”

He says that identifying your cravings is the first place to start. “Cravings for food can be triggered or activated by something external (people, places, events, experiences, or objects) or internal (feelings, thoughts, or memories). For example, an external trigger might be attending a birthday party. An internal trigger may be feelings of boredom or sadness. Becoming mindful of your triggers can help you determine how to cope when they show up.”

He also wants to transform the way we categorise food. “We take the stance that foods are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – they just are,” he says. The reason is that it can lead to “all-or-nothing thinking and we then may think of ourselves or our progress as either all good or all bad”. Stephenson agrees that this can lead to blowing the diet, with promises to start again on Monday. “In my experience, this is one of the most sabotaging ways to approach nutrition,” she says. “By the time you start again, you can feel the need to restrict even harder to get back on track, and so the cycle repeats.”