The girl on the StairMaster pounds the steps, her breath short and sharp, her face red with exertion. A sweaty T-shirt clings to her - and even through the cotton you can make out the ridges of her spine. She is emaciated. Dark hair covers every inch of her skeletal arms. It hurts to look at her.
Equally, it hurts to look at the man beside her. He too stands on the StairMaster, but the size of him means that you can hardly see the machine beneath his vast body. He breathes with difficulty, and sweat pours off him, soaking the rolls of T-shirt that encase his torso. As in my gym, so in life. While the alarm was raised this week about 75 per cent of Britons being obese by 2020, an epidemic of young women suffering from anorexia is also sweeping the land: one in 10 girls under 21 have been diagnosed with anorexia. Both trends reveal our unhealthy relationship with food.
The staff of life has become the stuff of nightmare. Where once upon a time meals were celebrations of family closeness, individual well-being, religious rituals, today most people view food with fear: lest it make us fat, ill, lose time, smell funny, look different from everyone else. Fewer than 40 per cent of Britons claim to sit down at a table for meals; fewer than 30 per cent cook all their own meals.
Watch people on a Tube platform or on the high street: some will be swigging from a soft drink can, some nibbling a chocolate bar, others scoffing a burger. Food (and drink) punctuate their walk, talk and gestures - linking, like a comma or a colon, different moments. No matter that cookery shows beef up our television schedule; or that celebrity chefs hog our newspapers. The unpalatable truth is that most Britons view food with either indifference or suspicion. No wonder. Food has become confusing in a culture that peddles simulatenously a slimline aesthetic and the fast food, television, video games and other sedentary leisure activities which guarantee this enviable 'look' won't be achieved.
Obesity, according to Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue and On Eating, 'is a response to people feeling attacked in their bodies'. On television, movies, magazines 'model' men and women with perfectly trim, wonderfully toned bodies smile back at you: the frustration of not measuring up prompts you to reach for comfort food. In the face of constant - even if unspoken - criticism about your weight, a chocolate binge or a feast of jam doughnuts is tantamount to sticking two fingers up at the body fascists out there. Anorexics, instead, see food as a four letter word that threatens to pollute their pure, unadulterated little-girl (or, more infrequently, little-boy) world. Both groups, as Susie Orbach points out, inevitably go hungry - and needy. A society composed of these dissatisfied citizens - the bag of bones, the grossly fat - has little to recommend it.
Somewhere between this polarity of response lies a balanced diet of five portions of fruit and veg, a bit of protein, a few carbohydrates. But this is no longer the staple fare; you're far more likely to be stuffing your face with a Big Mac or a Kentucky Fried Chicken wing. (Around the world, McDonald's boasts 45 million customers daily.)
In Fast Food Nation, American journalist Eric Schlosser condemns those fast food industrialists who, with a beady eye on the profit margin, ignore the effect their food has on our health. Cheap to make, oozing fat, high in salt, sugar and God knows what additives, fast food emerges as the primary culprit in our criminal abuse of our bodies. Eat junk food and you risk obesity - with its attendant increase in the chances of contracting diabetes, cancer, heart disease.
More sinister still, as Schlosser shows, fast-food marketing men have seized upon children as 'brand-loyal, from cradle to grave': they target the under-eights with Disneyesque mascots, cartoon strips and related accessories, and bank on the child's loyalty for ever more - or until his first heart attack.
Is the Government defending our interests in the battle of the flab? No, warns Profesor Philip James, co-author of a report on obesity which was presented at a EU meeting in Copenhagen last week. 'Officials are pretty terrified about how to confront some of the vested interest.' The same government that restricted tobacco advertising and hiked up prices on cigarettes and alcohol, could make mincemeat of food and soft drink giants. Banning soft drink vending machines from schools, reviewing fast food advertising, increasing the price of the more nefarious processed food products: there are many ways for Labour to curb our appetite for the unhealthy.
But big business not only threatens our health, it also shapes our body image. From the diet company that flaunts the before and after pictures of a tubby housewife transformed into a lithe glamour puss, to the television programme makers whose stars are all perfect size 10s, physical conformity is being pushed down our throats.
Some experts are finding this indigestible. Last January, Susie Orbach launched a campaign called 'Anybody' which aims to reshape our view of our selves - so that we can accept that within the canon of beauty, diversity is a plus. Fat, thin, plump, scrawny: Orbach and others hope that one day we will realise we are worth more than our weight in pounds and ounces. Maybe one day, my gym will be full of men and women of average size, pounding away on their StairMaster in between two healthy meals enjoyed at the kitchen table. Maybe one day.
Cristina Odone is deputy editor of the New Statesman
