THE COLOUR IS GRAY

In every woman's magazine it's the same story. Most women are unhappy about their shape, from the too fat to the (less often) too thin. Cross, waddling mothers wrestling themselves into disastrous trouser suits and gaunt-eyed anorexic girls, slaves to cocaine chic at ever younger ages: this is the story of our times. Today's diets occupy the same place that moral homilies did in Victorian times - plenty of variety in detail, same message in substance. Once we worried compulsively about the state of our souls. Now it's the state of our spare tyres.

 

This obsession has spread through politics too. Yet it is another area where government targets are simply to laugh at. When the Blair government warned early on that by 2005, 6% of men and 8% of women would be classified as obese, we took no notice of the nanny state and kept on gorging. In fact, by 2005, the real figures were 23% of men and 25% of women. And if we aren't yet American supersized people, we are going their way. According to government projections, within three years a third of men and 28% of women will be obese.

Something is obviously going very wrong. Endless taskforces, new government advice sheets and legislation to restrict advertising of fatty foods for children - indeed, even the best efforts of that missionary for proper food Jamie Oliver - have had absolutely no effect on the figures, in both senses. We are embroiled in a slow crisis of self-hatred, the first generations living through glut and disliking the result.

Part of the trouble is that in a stressed life - particularly if you don't have a huge income - food, in its infinite variety and relative cheapness, has become the ultimate contemporary consolation. For a long time booze, drugs, cigarettes have helped get people through the day. Each has been targeted by the state in variously aggressive ways. Yet quietly, with no problem about dealers or violence, sweet, fat-loaded food has become the fix of choice.

It's true for children as much as for adults. Those same projections suggest around a fifth of all children will be classified as obese within three years, their numbers rocketing along with the adults. For the picked-on child in the playground or the unconfident teenager, a large bar of chocolate or a slice of pizza is an ever-present comfort; for the hassled office worker it may be a triple-decker sandwich or full-fat muffin.

In the street the other day, I passed a grossly obese City-type man with a bag of cookies, cramming one after another into his mouth. He looked heartbreakingly unhappy. Obesity marks you out as a failure, and millions of people are just surrendering. For some this can feel as demoralising as a crack habit or a drink problem. It may not be as serious for "society". It causes no disorder in the streets, but behind the doors, obesity wrecks people's happiness too.

What can government do? Directly, not much. We need honest acknowledgement that, after insisting on proper information about the content of food, and after giving the citizen the facts, ministers can go no further in stopping us gorge. There is a liberty issue. You can ban smoking in enclosed areas, because smoking affects non-smokers. You can stop kids drinking in the streets. You can try to throttle the drugs trade. What you can't do is ban hamburgers or limit the consumption of chocolate chip cookies. In a free society it would rightly be thought ridiculous.

But the next thing is to listen, and realise that the missing component is simply exercise. The reason obesity is rising so fast isn't only the ubiquity of cheap and tasty manufactured food, it is that we don't work off the calories afterwards. Any regular dieter can tell you that following the plan without exercise may work for a few weeks but is hopeless in the longer term.

This is why last week's report by the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation, which said that fewer than one in five women do enough exercise to stay healthy, is so important. The survey found, as surveys do, that the explanations were obvious. Women are self-conscious about how they look when exercising, often hated sports at school and are horribly short of time, once kids and other caring duties are added in.

Gordon Brown grabbed this issue quickly, last week speaking of the "critical under-representation of women and girls in sport". The prime minister seems to fully understand that there are cultural barriers to be tackled and spoke of getting a million more women active in sports by 2012. As he also pointed out, when you ask women if they would like to take exercise, they tend to say yes.

The government's Active People survey found swimming to be the nation's most popular sporting activity. Yet local swimming pools are closing, like York Hall in Tower Hamlets, or being cut back, as in St Albans.

For competitive swimmers it is outrageous that there are only 16 pools of Olympic length (50 metres) in England and Wales, with another four planned. We're never going to produce internationally competitive swimmers if they don't have the training facilities.

But this is also an issue about class and culture. According to Sport England, 31% of black African women said they would like to swim regularly but had no easy access to a pool. The same was true of about a fifth of Indian and Bangladeshi women.

White middle-class women can afford the tennis clubs, private gyms and swimming pools. At the top end there seems to be a boom in personal trainers. For these women, generally, the diets will work because of the exercise. But a Labour government needs to think about the rest. Beyond the pools, free gym membership for less well-off women and advice through surgeries and hospitals are ideas Brown and his ministers need to push.

There certainly needs to be a fresh start. Is it really a good idea to have sport bracketed with culture and the media in a department dominated by turf wars? Sport and culture shouldn't be vying for funds. Couldn't sport be an integral part of the health strategy, and take its place inside that department, which has a bigger punching power in Whitehall, and could start to respond to the obesity crisis with gyms, tennis courts, running tracks and pools?

In the world of Westminster politics, all this may come across as second-order stuff. It isn't. If the health and happiness of citizens isn't the prime task of politics, I don't know what is. And you cannot be a healthy and happy person if you are seething with anxiety and self-hatred about your body.

jackie.ashley@guardian.co.uk