Slim fast, die older, and leave a good looking corpse with an average BMI.

In the battle against obesity it has been a war of attrition of late, with little ground gained by either side.

I have been slumped around the 17st 5lbs mark for most of the month, although the enemy looked to be breaking through after a pizza and beer blitzkrieg over the last couple of weekends.

So I was inspired into drastic action after seeing something on television that I was foolish enough to believe.

While I was in my usual half-comatose state in front of the box one night last week, some traffic-cops-on-patrol-real-life-hot-pursuit-police-camera-action thing came into view. The show was mildly entertaining in the way that a double cheeseburger is mildly satisfying.

But I was particularly interested when the two cops on patrol in question started talking about their diet regime, which seemed to be staggeringly successful.

The two drivers, called something like Biff and Smudge, apparently spend their working days driving round Essex in a high performance pursuit car looking for small time hoodies in clapped-out Ford Fiestas who might be smoking cannabis, while a hasbeen actor in a mockney accent gives it the beans on the voiceover. After making their bust they head out on the motorway in pursuit of an untaxed vehicle.

In a well-earned break they take their lunch while parked up on the roadside, which consists of a certain type of milkshake slimming drink. Their lunch that is, not the roadside.

They admit to being the fatboys of the team, and Smudge (or Biff) claims that he lost five stone in ten weeks! FIVE STONE! And his mate reckoned he shed two stone in just three weeks. That's going some, although I felt sorry for the doughnut shop owners who must be suffering as a consequence.

Both testimonials resulted in the best advertising that the slimming product could have hoped for as the next day I decided that variously flavoured milkshake was the way forward, and went out and bought a week's supply. A fair few pounds was lost instantly.

I thought I had found the answer to all my troubles. Here was an instant fix to my obesity, all I had to do was knock back a few of these for the next ten weeks and I would be slinking round in a pair of skinny leather trousers and a muscle-man t-shirt showing off my newly-sculpted pecs in no time.

The instructions seemed simple enough. One for breakfast, one for lunch with a normal evening meal.

Well, I say normal, what they actually mean is an evening meal the size of the average side order from your local pizza restaurant. Once I started to read the small print I soon realised that the whole thing was a bit iffy.

Basically you substitute real food for these milkshakes, which contain all the nutrients and things you need to survive on fluids for most of the day.

But what it then says is that in order for it to really work you can also have a couple of snacks, as long as they consist of fruit, you should drink at least two litres of water a day, eat an evening meal of no more than 600 calories and get more exercise.

So let me get this crystal clear, what they are saying is that if you consume fewer calories, eat more healthily and get more active, the chances are you could lose weight.

Oh my eyes! I've been blinded by the piercing light of truth from this revelation!

You also have to decide that eating food is nothing more than a daily function and be happy to remove any of the pleasure, taste and social interaction of having lunch.

How many journalists would go to lunch with their local MP to pan for nuggets of gossip over a couple of bottles of strawberry flavoured milk?

Perhaps it might go something like this: "I'll pass on the sea bass and cheeky bottle of Chablis thank you minister, I've already had my lunchtime milkshake meal substitute, and I couldn't eat another thing. Hmmmm, hmm."

Saying that, I bought into it wholeheartedly and on Monday I started my regime, hoping that by sticking to it for at least a week I would see some results.

By Wednesday lunchtime, just as I was contemplating my meal in a plastic bottle, my will power cracked faster than a Bristol City Council coalition - topical eh?

I was just so hungry and the thought of another milkshake was making me want to vomit. Which would probably have been a lot more successful.

All I had consumed over 48 hours was milkshake and soup, and I never realised how much I missed the humble sandwich. Although I will stop short of saying how much I missed the taste of meat in my mouth.

But what I also discovered was trying to find out the number of calories in food from the supermarket is something of a grey area, or even an orangey red area.

At my local supermarket, the packets have the been helpfully adorned with a colour-coded wheel to tell you how lardy your dinner is.

What I did not realise until this week is that round the edge of the wheel, in the smallest font known to printing, are the words 'half this pack contains the following', or '100 gram serving contains this much', or even 'just one miniscule teaspoon of this pack will make you fat', or something similar.

When I held my vacuum-packed selection of fresh pasta in my sweaty little hand, I took a quick look at the magic wheel and saw it was 500 calories, coming way under the 600 calories recommended by Die Hungry Fast, or whatever it's called.

But oh no, apparently if you ditch about 80 per cent of the dish, then you would be left with 500 calories.

So once again it seems my attempts to find a quick and effortless way to lose large amounts of weight are thwarted at the first hurdle.

Who knew there wasn't an easy way to do this. Seems like there's no substitute for sensible eating, more exercise and losing weight gradually and sensibly.

Boo.