A fat-fighting New Year?

I love the gym on a January morning. The frantic flush on the faces of the bankers as they Stairmaster to redundancy, the quivers of the anorexics staggering into their fifth mile. Actually, there aren’t any anorexics. The anorexics of Bloomsbury are clearly lacking in New Year’s resolve. Hardly surprising, as despite the tsunami of publicity annually devoted to the perils of eating disorders, only 19 out of 1,000,000 women are suffering from anorexia, according to Clinical Knowledge Summaries, as opposed to the 240,000 afflicted with obesity. Hardly an epidemic, yet anorexia is one of those curious points of intersection where the Guardian and the Daily Mail agree. Despite being a lifestyle choice which clearly requires exceptional discipline, the jutting collarbones of the Grim Reaper apparently stalk the high street, lying in wait for any teenage girl whose self-esteem has plummeted due to an overdose of Heat.

One wonders then, whether Eric Pickles will succumb to detox pressure in 2009 or will he learn to love his curves? David Cameron has supposedly questioned Mr Pickles’s suitability to occupy a seat or two on his front bench on the grounds of the latter’s portliness.