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What’s Eating Rotherham

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BBC Radio 4 - What’s Eating Rotherham

Rotherham resident Joanne Keeling looks at the problem of emotional overeating in the town

Rotherham resident Joanne Keeling who is 28 stone investigates why the town still has a problem with obesity, despite being supported over 10 years ago by the chef Jamie Oliver.

Why do you keep going back to the fridge after dinner? Fruit and vegetables, a balanced diet, low salt, low sugar and moderate exercise seem to be the silver bullets loaded into a revolver that has only ever fired blanks at the problem of Britain’s obesity crisis. More than ten years ago, the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver came to Rotherham in an effort to help combat obesity, by providing information on how to cook healthy foods. A decade on Rotherham still has a high proportion of people that are overweight or obese.

In What’s Eating Rotherham, local resident Joanne Keeling, who is 28 stone and trying to lose weight, looks at the emotional side of overeating and examines the effect Jamie Oliver - and the spotlight he brought to Rotherham - can have on a town at the centre of media attention. With the help of Producer Jay Unger, Joanne soon discovers an uncomfortable truth about why some people emotionally eat. As well as questioning whether or not traditional methods of treating obesity, like prescribed exercise and diet regimes, actually work she wants to learn about the psychology of why people overeat in the first place.

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