There are a million reasons why we're fat. Part of my teenage obesity problem can be blamed on Anna Soubry – the now under-secretary of state for health. I've got a big 27-year rib eye of a grudge with her. Nearly three decades ago, she was a fresh-faced presenter hosting my local TV station's version of Points of View. I was a chubby teenager inflated by gourmet lunches at my independent school and comfort eating on my crappy council estate (the 11-plus could lead to a very conflicted existence). I wrote to her expressing my thoughts about how her channel could be improved. "She" (OK, it was probably someone on work experience) wrote back and said send us a photo – we want to use your letter on the actual TV! Nearly peeing myself with excitement, I spent two quid posing at Woolworths in the passport machine for the perfect picture. Two quid. That was a vinyl single. A little piece of Wham! A whole week's pocket money. I sent it and I watched week after week after week. My letter never got read out. I knew why. The bitter, terrible reality of the media world was clear to me even then. My pudgy face didn't fit. I didn't have enough glamour for Anna. In retrospect, perhaps my suggestion that The Blues Brothers should be shown every day at midnight was a bit niche. But that didn't matter. Her rejection of me led me straight to a multipack of Blue Riband biscuits. I've always anaesthetised a sour experience with something sweet.
For many of us, food becomes our greatest comfort in times of rejection, stress and unhappiness. It's this country's biggest pick-me-up. Triple-dip recessions, this endless sense that there's never any good news and now even the foxes are turning on us. Then a tube of Pringles appears and wouldn't it be lovely right now to wolf them down with an episode of Call the Midwife. Food has become our addiction. As a lifelong comfort eater, it makes perfect sense to me. Food is a beautiful, accessible, easy lay for all of us. Epicurean delights can be found in every social sector. Eric Pickles has clearly been necking some serious foie gras. I still have a dark chocolate digestive or seven when I'm stressed. It's like a drug – just a totally legal one that's easily available from Tesco 24 hours a day with no dealer involved.
Food has never been just fuel to us. It has much more of an emotional pull. It's about showing love. Just sometimes you can show a bit too much affection. We've all got a comfort food. We've all got a dish that can immediately transport us back to the past. Likewise, that emotional relationship with food can be easily distorted. My Nan never got over the hell of wartime rationing. To her, food was a luxury, a joy, something to indulge others in simply because she could. She presented pic 'n' mix sweets to me with the same reverence that the wise men presented Frankincense to the baby Jesus. In the early 80s, she was still buying my brother a massive box of crackers every morning to take to school. Consequently, his nickname was Ritz for many years. He struggled with that moniker and his weight, mainly because, up until very recently, it was still etched in concrete near the toilets in our town square.
Many of us are defined by our size and what we consume, far more than we ever should be. Entire family rituals can be based around "bad" food – and lots of it. The Friday Chinese. The Saturday kebab after six pints. My elder brother used to work at an animal-feed processing plant. Every week, a lorry would turn up with 10 tonnes of misshapen chocolates. Some of these were "salvaged" and brought to our house. I'm sorry that certain livestock missed out on their confectionery fix because of us, but one of my favourite childhood memories is sharing this mixture with my siblings. It felt naughty and illicit – and also guilt-free. Daisy the cow/Babe the pig was unlikely to notice this tiny sweet imbalance. In retrospect, it was a bonding session – food as emotional glue. It gave us a sense of being "together" doing something.
It's that sense of "togetherness" that can make weight in families seem like a tribe-like state of being. Trying to lose pounds in a fat family can almost be seen as an act of disloyalty. I've seen it first-hand with a friend. She attempted to "eat better" and was deliberately sabotaged by grenades of gourmet takeaways and larders exploding with chocolate and biscuits. Our weight never just belongs to us but to others. We don't necessarily want people to look better because, stupidly, we believe that might make us feel even worse about ourselves.
Our diet and our appearance have taken on more significance than they ever should. The whole sense of how we feel about ourselves is sometimes reduced to a burger. That's bloody crazy. This isn't the Stone Age. Food has gone way beyond fuel.
The reasons for obesity are as wide as our expanding waistlines. Perhaps we're getting fatter because we are starved of what gives us real satisfaction – time with family and the time to do what we actually enjoy doing. The nation's health can't be summarised by any politician into one neat Happy Meal soundbite. We need to work out why food has become the UK's panacea and work our way back from there. That way, we have a chance of not just improving the nation's health but its happiness too.
