Like many people my age, my terrible eating habits can be traced directly to my grandparents.

They were born in the early-30's and grew up in a time when the food products we now associate with poor lifestyle either hadn't been invented or were very hard to come by.

This was also a time before mass public transportation and telecommunications when physical exercise was not a leisure activity but a constituent part of everyday life. It was around this time that the first drive-in restaurants started popping up across the Atlantic, heralding the age of fast food.

The junk-food phenomenon, and its attendant challenges for society, would likely have arrived in the UK a lot sooner. Luckily, we dodged a bullet by becoming embroiled in the Second World War.

By the time the UK began integrating with Europe in the seventies the food revolution was well under way. The field of food science gave competing producers new insights into how human beings reacted to products, physiologically, depending on how they were configured.

Consumers became spoiled for choice and as government regulation tightened and links were identified between processed foods and health problems, such as high cholesterol, a whole sub-genre of seemingly harmless low-fat products became available.

By the time I was born in the eighties, the whole process of sourcing and producing food was fundamentally different; changing more in my grandparents lifetimes than it had the previous 10,000 years of human history.

Eating was no longer a necessity that required preparation, but rather, it was an entitlement, a human right and a leisure activity that could be delivered to your home within the hour.

My journey into junk food started very early and was hastened by the fact nutrition was not an area of expertise in my family - which may have had something to do with school.

Every day we'd queue outside the dinner hall, talking about what we were going to have for lunch that day, as the seagulls hovered patiently overhead waiting for scraps. Salty soups, pies, pastries, chips, roast potatoes, battered fish, sausages and breaded chicken, in all shapes and sizes, covered in baked beans, gravy, mushy peas and brown or red sauce.

Deserts were obligatory, consisting of caramel cakes, empire biscuits, Angel Delight, or choc-ices - all of which came with custard. On the off-chance you weren't thinking about sweets and were, instead, focusing on learning, a tuck trolley filled to the brim with chocolate bars, chewy sweets, fizzy drinks, fruit juices and crisps would roll through your classroom, interrupting the lesson before interval ensuring the thought of junk food was never far from your mind.

Too bad the English teachers couldn't see the metaphors writing themselves at this point.

Obtaining and consuming these 'treats' became a daily ritual and play-time was as much about pigging out as it was about playing. I began making strong emotional associations between certain types of food and their corresponding situations and if, on occasion, I found myself without tuck because I had no pocket money, then play time was tinged with melancholy.

Luckily, at my grandparents there was rarely a disruption in the supply of treats.

We would often start the day with Sugar Puffs or a cereal of that nature. Throughout the afternoon, we would snack on white bread, cups of tea with two or three sugars and nibble on chocolate biscuits. Sometimes we would even drink Carnation milk from the can if conventional treats were in short supply.

Then there were the flavoured yogurts with the little chocolate side-cars that went down great as a snack between meals.

Dinner at my gran's usually consisted of classic cuisine like mince and potatoes, pies and chips, sausages and beans or homemade soup - which I'm certain my gran would have deep fried if it were possible.

Everybody loves going to their granny's, but not a lot of people ever stop for a second to consider the reasons. For me, one of the reasons was, undoubtedly, sugar: a toxic stimulant to which I was exposed and addicted at a very young age.

When I started living on my own my eating got much worse.

Just thinking about a bag of chips or a sausage supper sent a wave of elation through my veins; my pulse quickening as I imagined washing down the first salty mouthful with a long swig of ice-cold Coca Cola.

At my grans, a chippy was a weekend treat but when I was living on my own then it's really all I ate.

My poor diet was compounded by the fact that the fabled work at the shipyards my grandparents were always on about had, at some point, been replaced with unemployment or jobs either serving or stacking this kind of food.

It was everywhere and there was no escape. You can imagine how thrilled I was to quit drinking, stop taking and drugs and bin the fags only to discover I was really a fat diabetic with gum disease all along.

My life has is now about keeping that potential version of myself at bay, but it's very challenging.

For me the biggest triggers for binge eating are stress, resentment and boredom - emotions which, I'm sure you'll agree, are in no short supply. It could be an argument with my partner, a social-media altercation or something work-related that sets me off. The trigger activates the "stuff it" protocol which leads to a "slip".

The slip is a minor deviation from the plan you started the previous Monday. One slip inevitably turns to two and then three until the that day is a write-off.

By morning, after a twitchy, restless sleep, the dishonest thinking has taken root and all-of-a-sudden the clean-eating drive you embarked on doesn't seem so important and usually gets postponed until the following Monday.

The intervening days are spent in a sugary twilight, where the usual rules do not apply, and you spend hours fantasising about all of the changes you're going to make the following week while pouring a cartons of Skittle flavoured milk down your throat.

My emotional eating was made worse by my lack of knowledge about nutrition. This included where food came from as well as how my body reacted to it. I just looked at the packaging, which usually depicted an earnest looking farmer underscored by the word "fresh" or "low fat" and took it at face value.

When I tried to start eating better and switched from Sugar Puffs to Bran Flakes, or from white bread to brown bread, or from Coca Cola to Sunny Delight, or from full fat milk to low-fat yogurt I genuinely thought I was making informed decisions.

What I didn't know was that even the slightly less harmful options are full of junk too and that "low fat" really means "full of sugar".

There is no doubt that reining in the excesses of the food industry is a matter of great import, for a multitude of reasons. But we should aspire to take some degree of personal responsibility, not just for the food we eat, but the emotional difficulties that drive much of that consumption.

Our continued consumption is what incentivises the food industry to keep creating these products. One of the most effective means of influencing them is to spend our money on something healthier.

Part of that is about educating ourselves on what's in our food and how our bodies react to it. But more importantly, about accepting, as hard as it is, that lifestyle changes can't always be legislated for by government and that at some point we have to stop making excuses and get the finger out.

I'll start on Monday.

Commentary by Darren McGarvey. Darren is a writer and broadcaster and, under the name Loki, a rapper and hip hop artist. His music can be found here.