Give me a crash course in . . . Gillian McKeith

In the news this weekWho knew "petrified" was even in the vocabulary of the nutritional terrorist Gillian McKeith?

Her appearance on ITV's I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!this week as a quivering, screaming, whingeing wreck with a phobia about all things creepy-crawly was a revelation for anyone who has fantasised about pinning her down and force-feeding her saturated fats.

The reactionThe question on everybody's lips is: "Why is someone with a fear of insects appearing on a TV show that is effectively an insectathon?" The more charitable among us believe the 51-year-old Scot when she says she didn't know what she was getting into. Another view is that she is an insufferable notice box who is playing to the cameras in a desperate attempt to boost her flagging TV career. The Sunreported Ant and Dec saying that she definitely has a game plan, and Katie Price has called her selfish for not finishing her trials. She hasn't endeared herself to many of her campmates, especially Britt Ekland, who doesn't believe McKeith didn't know what the show is like.

The British publicThey are showing no mercy. After her fainting episode in a trial where she was chained underground in a coffin-like box, they were quick to nominate her for one in which she refused, on the grounds that she's a vegan, to eat crocodile genitals, bull's tongue, beach worms and crickets.

Could this be payback for the humiliations she subjected overweight people to on her Channel 4 programme You Are What You Eat?The take-no-prisoners nutritionist told her victims to "eat right or die young" before examining their poo and telling them they were environmental hazards because of their flatulence.

The womanBorn on September 28th, 1959, on a social housing estate in Perth where she says she grew up eating junk food, she reportedly met her husband, an American lawyer named Howard Magaziner, in Edinburgh, where he was studying. They ran a US chain of health-food stores that filed for bankruptcy in 1996, owing $117,000 (€86,000).

They live in London and have two daughters, Afton and Skylar.

In 2004 she shot to fame as the host of You Are What You Eatand Dr Gillian McKeith's Feel Fab Forever. She has also reported for the Joan Rivers Show in the US . As well as appearances on Channel 4's Supersize vs Superskinny,she is the author of a number of books. In 2008 she donned a PVC catsuit and whip to promote her The Complete A-Z Guide to a Healthy Life.

In 2007 the UK Advertising Standards Authority told her to drop the Dr from her name, which she was using on the basis of a PhD in holistic nutrition gained through a correspondence course from an unaccredited American college. Earlier that year she was censured by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency for selling a range of herbal sex pills called Fast Formula Horny Goat Weed Complex and was ordered to remove the products from sale immediately.

One of her fiercest critics, the Guardian'sBen Goldacre, has called her a menace to science. His book Bad Science devotes an entire chapter to picking apart her scientific credibility.

So what now?

Now we know she's a nervous nelly and not a tough bossy boots, it's going to be hard for her to wield the same authority as a scary diet detective. Maybe after a stint in therapy to get over her phobia, in which she's force-fed witchetty grubs (televised, of course) she could do a new reality-TV series called Feel the Fear and Eat it Anyway.