NOW I’m not one to give rent-a-gob Katie Hopkins more publicity for saying vile and crass things, but I’m finding it very hard to keep quiet about her latest project.

Displaying her characteristic sensitivity, she has eaten her way through 6,500 calories a day to make herself four stones heavier in a pathetic attempt to prove that overweight people should stop blaming everyone else for their problems.

And, of course, it will be televised because nothing this lady does is philanthropic.

Just to re-cap, Hopkins has previously said that “fat people need to look in the mirror, look at themselves and realise it’s their fault.”

Now that’s very easy for a middle class, privileged lady to say whilst choosing to munch her way through Pringles and shortbread.

Chubbing up for the cameras has been hugely stressful for her - “I hate fat people for making me do this,” she sobbed. “I’m not lucky to be skinny...it’s really hard being fat. Carrying this around is exhausting.”

But it won’t be for long, when the filming’s over she’ll be paying overtime to her personal trainer and chef.

As a soon-to-retire slimming consultant, I’m doubly vexed. One, with Hopkins for dissing the easy target of the overweight and two, with TLC the TV company for giving her airtime.

In the three years that I have been supporting people to lose weight, I have realised that there are many types of slimmer. One type has a couple of stones to lose gained with pregnancy, another has eaten an extra 500 calories a day over a long period.

These people, if they stick at a healthy eating plan, will achieve their goal because they’ve simply eaten a bit too much. So when they rein it in, they lose it.

And then there’s another type. They tend to be bigger and have deep-rooted emotional issues. Food is used as a weapon to beat themselves because they don’t believe that they deserve anything better than to look, in their minds, hideous. Some have confided stories of past abuses and tragedies. And in the more desperate cases it’s easy to see, if they weren’t overeating, they’d be self-harming. Losing weight is mind over consumption, but if the mind isn’t healthy and focused, it will never control the body’s cravings.

Hopkins’ experiment is a cruel joke. Until misery and self-hatred, rather than her own self-seeking vanity, cause her to seek solace in the biscuit barrel, she has no right to criticise. It’s like a woman dressing up as a bloke and reporting what it feels like to be a man.