Step aside Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. When it comes to people making great personal sacrifice for the betterment of humanity, you have nothing on Katie Hopkins.

The famously outspoken British social commentator is sacrificing her body and her mental health to in an attempt to answer all the questions about obesity that have perplexed the medical establishment for the last century.

Saint Katie set out to prove — yes PROVE — two things: that it's not possible to be fat and happy, and that obesity is a choice since anyone can lose weight if they really want to.

Hopkins — who has built a career out of fat shaming everybody from complete strangers to Mariah Carey — is recording a weight study for a documentary called Journey To Fat And Back set to air in the UK early next year.

After binge-eating her way to a 20 kilogram weight increase, Hopkins had the startling realisation that forcing yourself to consume 6500 calories a day is not very much fun.

"This is a stupid project," she confesses to the camera after eating cereal with chocolate milk, a donut, two pieces of toast, pasta, 10 pieces of shortbread, two cans of drink, a jacket potato, chocolate cake and a tube of Pringles.

You said it sister! At least there's one thing we both agree on. Aside from learning that eating enormous quantities of food every day results in weight gain (well duh!) her endeavours add precisely nothing to public discussions about obesity.

Even if we accept Hopkins' assertions that being fat makes people miserable and losing weight is easy, then the question becomes: why would anybody be fat?

But that would be to apply simple logic to the premise of a show that's about creating a spectacle for ratings.

This, after all, is the woman who has previously said fat people should "stop blaming everyone else for problems they can control". But, then in the promotional reel for her experiment, she whines, "I hate fat people for making me do this."

MORE FROM KATIE HOPKINS: Ginger Babies are harder to love; Fat parents are to blame; Size 12 businesswoman 'large'.

Hypocritical? Much. Let's nut this one through. Fat people have only themselves to blame for their fate, but somehow fat people are responsible for Hopkins getting involved with a wholly contrived reality TV show in which she stuffs herself to within an inch of her life.

In the end, Hopkins' social experiment led to the following conclusion: that she didn't enjoy being fat. As Hopkins explains "I didn't cry at childbirth. I didn't cry at my wedding. But I cried over this because I was just so disgusting."

And she will most likely return to her original body weight. According to her report on Twitter last week she has one stone (6.4kg) left to lose. Tick!

But what have we really learned from Hopkins' efforts, other than that staring at, scrutinising and judging women's bodies has become a form of entertainment?

The only lesson is that obesity is too complex to be reduced to the tedious moralising of a reality TV show. It's about poverty, past history of dieting, genetics, stress, mental health, the food industry, the food supply and, yes, individual behaviour. It's all of these combined, and any attempt to say it's just about individual choice is to be willfully naive.

And there is a growing number of people in the Fat Acceptance and Health At Every Size movements who claim to be happy, or at least not unhappy, being fat. It's pretty arrogant for a person with a video camera and a bag full of junk food to say that they're all lying.

When the global diet industry is worth US$586.3 billion you'd also be hard pressed to argue that those who are unhappy with their body weight aren't succeeding in losing it because they're not trying.

Like Katie, many women have shed tears over their bodies. We cry because we believe our bodies are too fat, too thin, too small, too tall, too coloured, too pale, too saggy, too hairy, too curvy, and/or too straight.

It's not the size or shape of our bodies that makes us unhappy, but the obsession with them and the way we are judged because of them.

Journey To Fat And Back is just one more way to reduce a woman's identity, worth and morality to her physical appearance.

- Kasey Edwards is a writer and best-selling author. www.kaseyedwards.com