Fat is the new cancer. Last week, a conference on obesity warned that the government is not putting nearly enough resources into making us thinner, and that being overweight will soon rival smoking and drinking as the biggest drain on the nation's health services. The week before, we were told that obesity is reaching such epidemic levels among children that many can expect to be outlived by their less corpulent parents. Fat is a public menace, goes the message, and we're all going to hell - only not in a handcart, something more akin to a skip lorry, perhaps.
The answer? Simple: we should eat less and exercise more.
Exercise has tremendous benefits. It helps beat stress. It means you sleep better. It wards off depression. It gives you a sense of well-being - including, let's be honest, a sense of superiority over your less toned colleagues. It's an all-round panacea; so, yes, most of us should exercise more.
But not me.
Don't get me wrong: I do exercise; I love exercising. The problem is, I love it too much. Obesity is not even a theoretical threat for me. The only way, frankly, I could ever weigh more than 13 stone would be if I swapped my obsessions with cycling and swimming for one with bodybuilding and started swallowing gallons of disgusting looking protein drinks. It's not likely, but I know the mentality.
Since it seems we're going to be hearing more about the exercise imperative, it's worth visiting what one might call the "dark side" of fitness: the twilight world of the exercise addict. Take, for example, this sample week from the diary of one workout junkie I know:
Saturday: left house at 7am to fit in a two-hour bike ride.
Sunday: nothing - withdrawal symptoms noted, combined with wishful thoughts of attending swimming club training session.
Monday: swimming at lunchtime - good workout.
Tuesday: wanted to swim again in lunch hour, but was persuaded to play tennis instead. Slight feelings of regret (tennis not aerobic enough).
Wednesday: took afternoon off work for long bike ride.
Thursday: met an old friend for a drink - but only after both have attended a swimming club session.
Friday: a day off, but only because another strenuous bike ride is scheduled for Saturday morning.
What we're looking at here is a clinical condition. This person feels sullied by inactivity after a single day; after two days, he is practically climbing walls.
Sustained deprivation from exercising leads first to irritability and restlessness, and then to determined and devious attempts to feed his habit. Finally, the subject's anxiety about his declining fitness leads to a near-psychotic state where he fantasises constantly about exercising.
You think I'm kidding? The diary, of course, was mine. Like all addicts, I think I have my problem "under control". In a healthier period, I actually wrote a book about giving up cycling. Now I've relapsed, falling not so much off the wagon as back on to the bike.
Still, I believe my exercising can be "managed". Like an alcoholic who chews mints and hides bottles, I take great pains to present a veneer of normality. And I comfort myself that I'm nothing like as bad as some of the people I've seen in cycling and swimming clubs. The triathletes, for example, who make my own exercise compulsion look like a gentle stroll in the park.
A New Yorker article I once read about a woman who swam the Bering Strait (between Alaska and Siberia) quoted a statistic that eight out of 10 marathon swimmers suffer from some form of psychological stress. Not everyone deals with unhappiness by swimming the Channel (and neither does everyone who swims the Channel do so because they are dealing with unhappiness). It's a spectrum thing, though, and I do know people who suddenly found themselves going to the gym with a born-again zeal when a relationship broke up or a close relative died. Where some people hit the bottle, overeat or self-harm, the exercise addict works out.
There are more obviously destructive forms of dependency. Exercise does not, for instance, cause street crime. At least, I've never heard of anyone funding their gym subscription through mugging or burglary. What is more, exercise addicts are usually so full of endorphins they rarely need a prescription for Prozac.
Yet it does have costs. Exercise addicts conduct secret lives in which they furtively plan how they are going to score their next hit. Their need to work out interferes with their work, and deprives their families of their time. Such obsessional behaviour absorbs energy that might otherwise be deployed in more creative, less narcissistic ways. In short, excessive exercising makes one a very boring person indeed.
I sometimes cycle past people sitting outside a country pub, with pints in front of them, and think, "That looks nice." Those people might not be very fit, they might even be obese, but they're having fun. They have, in other words, what is commonly called "a life".
