CLEARING out my flat at the weekend I found an envelope of photographs. Remember those? The ones you took with a film camera, trotted off to the high street to have developed and then stuck in a drawer never to be looked at again.

Or at least not until clear out time. These pictures weren’t particularly old but from just before the time of camera phones and what they showed me was a premier version of myself: one for whom diet and exercise were serious concerns.

I danced, I swam, I went to yoga classes. All my meals were home made and carefully calculated for fruit and vegetable content, omega fats, whatever the big health trends at the time would have been.

I was slim but, more importantly, fit. I ran a 10k with very, very little preparation and without trainers. I just did it in some sneakers and was totally fine.

Cut to Tuesday evening and I’m sitting at my desk eating a Waitrose tiramisu cake out of the box - probably about 10 slices - because I hadn’t made it out of the office in time to be home for a dinner made from all the vegetables and fish in my fridge and this was near at hand.

Fortunately a spoon was also near by and I wasn’t using my hands to eat it, but don’t think I wouldn’t. I don't deserve your generosity.

Would I have still tackled the tiramisu cake if it was in plain packaging that didn’t promise me a delicious sponge soaked in Marsala wine with Mascarpone frosting and dark Belgian chocolate shavings? If it was just a sludge green box?

Tough question. When you’re tired and hungry and stressed, it’s not easy to make good choices.

An Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report identifies obesity as one of three main causes - with smoking and alcohol and substance abuse - of preventable illness and calls for a "new approach" for tackling them.

One suggestion is that crisps, sweets and sugary drinks are sold in plain packaging, much the same way as cigarettes now are. There was no suggestion that scare photos are also added to the packaging, such as the lung cancer and stunted foetuses of fag packets. I just Googled "cigarette packet images" to get an idea of what they look like and good God.

If there was a similar image of black rotted teeth on that tiramisu cake I wouldn't have touched it but I suppose we can't add pictures like that to, say, Freddo bars because someone must think of the children.

Well, the IPPR is thinking of the children - and parents who have to deal with pleading children at supermarket checkouts - but not everyone is impressed by the suggestion.

Matthew Lesh, head of research at the Adam Smith Institute, pulled absolutely no punches. "These proposals are insane," he said, drawing back his right hook to get yet more power behind it, “Authoritarian and seriously lacking in evidence. Sadly the expletive words of choice to describe this proposal are simply not fit for print.

"The British people are sick of this type of extremist, nanny statist paternalism.

"The plain packing proposal would create a grey, boring, dystopian scene in our supermarkets and corner shops."

Well, not quite: sweets came in plain packaging in the form of paper bags and no one complained. You queued up at the counter, gazed in wonder at the many, many colours and shapes before you and then were forced to choose an ounce. Or the other option was a 10p mixture, chosen by the woman behind the counter.

Maybe we could return sweets to a Pick n’ Mix style layout but with a maximum purchase limit, satisfying both a preference for style and a limit of substance. There would be special exemptions for famous packaging, such as Tunnock’s Teacakes. If your packaging has featured heavily in the opening ceremony of a Commonwealth Games then it is untouchable.

There was some suggestion that fruit and vegetables can’t compete with sweet things for popularity as they lack lively packaging. Of course, repackaging fruit and veg won't work because, as well as cracking down on obesity, we’re cracking down on wasteful plastic and trying to sell items in as naked a form as possible.

Waitrose, to name them again, this week leading the mainstream (plenty of local shops already do this) charge on the high street with unpackaged food.

Perhaps the solution is for the nanny state to provide real life nannies. A nutritionally trained Norland Nanny for every home.

The IPPR makes serious points, of course, which should be met seriously. That is, that obesity is responsible for almost one in five deaths. The Scottish Government's ambition is to halve child obesity rates by 2030 and to do this bold moves will have to be taken with radical action on high sugar consumption.

It's hard to take bold moves when people balk at every suggestion for doing so. Look at the hoo-ha over the reduction in sugar in Irn Bru. Stockpiling of original recipe cans, no less.

The reasons behind unhealthy eating are deeply complex: time constraints, financial complaints, lengthy working hours, emotional rather than practical connections to food.

As a nation, we have a starkly polarised view of food whereby we luxuriate in it - queues for Krispy Kreme doughnut stores, delight in every North American high fat, high sugar chain that crosses the pond - but scorn those who show any signs of having eaten it.

Plain food packaging isn't the way forward but what we do need is a repackaging of our willingness to accept drastic change - not even Mary Poppins could manage great change without that.