AT a time when the nation is battling an obesity timebomb and when we’re all being told we need to get more exercise, one of the biggest employers in the land is encouraging us to stay home to get fat.

McDonald’s is to start home delivery.

That’s great, now we don’t even have to raise our fat backsides off the sofa and get out of the house to guzzle their fast food and fries.

It was only a question of time really. We already have pizza deliveries and there are other firms who specialise in bringing takeaway food straight to your door.

It’s a multi-billion pound area of the food industry that the Golden Arches have been surprisingly slow to cotton on to.

It is bizarre how we’re battling obesity when there’s no doubt that we’ve become obsessed with health and how we look.

It’s in all our papers, but magazines are worse.

I took my littl’un to the dentist this week and while I was waiting, I made the mistake of picking up a magazine aimed at younger women.

It was a real eye-popping, jaw- dropping experience.

It was packed with photos and stories of reality celebs who had put on weight but wanted to lose it, others who had lost so much weight that “we’re all worried about them” and still more who looked “fantastic” in their gym gear.

Page after page after page.

All were women – but there’s the same pressure on blokes to get ‘sculpted abs’ and look like some chiselled genetic freak.

We’re all supposed to spend all our leisure time drinking smoothies made of grass, going to the gym and eating just the right amount of this that and the other to counter age, lumps, saggy bits and wrinkles.

But all that looks like it’s destined for the bin.

Now there’s news that we might not need to go to gym any more to get a sleeker, slimmer body.

A pill is being developed to trick your body into thinking it has exercised.

Scientists have found that suppressing production of a protein increased muscle mass and led to improvements in heart and kidney health.

So far, it only works in mice but if development is successful, the drug – meant to help those who are physically unable to go to the gym – could help battle both diabetes and the fast-growing obesity epidemic.

That’s great for those who are disabled or so obese that they can’t get exercise.

But the problem with this is that people generally will just see it as a fast-track way to lose weight or keep it down, without the bother of taking strenuous, sweaty exercise.

A work-out doesn’t just get rid of calories, improve muscle tone and improve our skin.

It makes our hearts and lungs work better, lowers blood pressure, boosts the happy chemicals in our brain and even gives us a sense of achievement.

Lying on a sofa and alternating orders for takeaways and fat-busting pills may be less bother in our busy and stressful lives.

But it doesn’t sound like much of a fun life to me.