"Like a lot of families where the parents aren't together there were a number of challenges and conflict, and a great deal of stress," he says. "I was drinking daily, with times of binge drinking, and as a family we were eating a lot of takeaway meals.The girls and I had a routine, but I had no methods of keeping their behaviour positive." Everything changed when Lizzie started school and Luke began using his professional skills to help out with cookery classes for the children. These were such a success that the staff at the children's centre invited him to join an eight-week course put together by a children's health charity called Henry, Health Exercise Nutrition for the Really Young. Since then he hasn't looked back.
The course taught him to offer his daughters "guided choices" when it came to food and he also learned about the concept of a balanced plate, portion sizes and identifying stepping stones for change, such as reducing the number of takeaways they consumed.
"I now cook healthy meals from scratch, and I know exactly what my kids are eating," he says. "It's also a lot cheaper than a takeaway every night. I am drinking much less these days, some weeks I don't have a drink at all, and I no longer binge drink."
Luke is just one of 6,000 parents to participate in a scheme funded by Leeds City Council that has had a remarkable impact on childhood obesity.
Between 2009 and 2013, obesity rates among children starting school in Leeds averaged 9.4 per cent but after the introduction of the ground-breaking Healthy Families programme organised by Henry they fell to 8.8 per cent over the next four years - a period when they remained stable in England as a whole.
Perhaps most impressively, the biggest fall was among the most deprived fifth of children, where rates fell from 11.5 per cent to 10.5 per cent.
Meanwhile, across the country, obesity in this group was unchanged at 12 per cent while in a sample of 15 cities that are demographically similar to Leeds, it rose from 11.6 per cent to 11.7 per cent, according to data published in the journal Pediatric Obesity.
"This is astonishing," says Susan Jebb, a professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford, who analysed the figures. "We know there is this striking relationship in England between deprivation and obesity. Nationally, this gap is getting wider. But in Leeds, in the reception class children, there is something really striking that has gone on."
Luke at work on Henry scheme (Image: NC)
Given that an obese five-year-old has only a one-in-20 chance of returning to a healthy weight by age 11, the success of the Leeds programme could have far-reaching consequences for the 2016 nation's health. After all, obesity leads to a higher incidence of life-shortening conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
Research has shown that, if obesity levels continue to rise, 128,000 UK adults a year will die young by 2030. If this increase was stopped, it would reduce early deaths to about 118,000 annually.
The Leeds scheme works by training staff such as health visitors, nursery staff and children's centre workers in "authoritative parenting" and healthy eating.
An estimated 1,200 practitioners and volunteers have been involved and they have had tens of thousands of contacts with parents and their pre-school children over the years the scheme has been in operation.
Based on their interactions, they are encouraged to refer parents for council-funded classes if they think it will help.
Belinda Mould, 40, certainly found the classes helpful. Her three-year-old daughter Libby-Joy loved sausages and beans and would turn her bowl upside down if she was served anything else.
"I used to get frustrated," says Belinda, "but the classes taught me to be more patient
