INSPIRATION can be found in unlikely places. In a topic trawl this week, two surprising subjects have been hauled up in my columnist's net.

They are an obese American, but not just any overweight citizen of the USA, because there are millions of those; and a thrown-away bottle of Sunny Delight.

Steve Vaught is 40 and used to weigh the best, or worst, part of 30 stone. Filled with alarm and self-disgust, he decided to walk across America, from his home in California to New York.

I once drove across the US with a great friend, sadly now dead. We covered 3,000 miles in a week. It was quite a journey - but to walk across America, that is a true odyssey.

My trip saw two twentysomething Brits doing a tourist take on the American dream, travelling by car and eating fast food along Route 66. Steve Vaught is pursuing what many of his fellow citizens would see as the great American nightmare. He is walking in a land which worships the car. Furthermore, after eating so much fast food he was more or less committing slow suicide, he is trying to eat healthily. This hasn't proved easy because rotten food has been his undoing, and he knows it.

He has, however, lost 114lb and seems to have found self belief and integrity. I know the "lost and found" image here is a little glib, but Steve's journey is remarkable enough to stand as a hymn to transformation. He is now a counter-cultural hero, feted by reporters and soon to appear on the Oprah TV show.

Steve dismisses his new status, telling one British newspaper: "People seem to think I am some kind of American hero, but I am just a guy."

You can trace Steve's progress via his website, TheFatManWalking.com, where his trip has been charted from last April. He has tramped 2,200 miles over Californian mountains, through the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, across the plains of Texas and Oklahoma and through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

At present he is in Ohio, where he grew up in the decaying steel city of Youngstown, a place bleakly celebrated in song by Bruce Springsteen.

Twenty years ago, Steve was a US Marine. Following a series of personal difficulties, he fell into depression and comfort eating. A year ago, realising that he could die if he carried on in this way, leaving his kids without a father, he became the fat man who walked.

There is something so inspirational about Steve, who seems such an ordinary sort of hero, as the best heroes often are. It would be easy to put too much on Steve's shoulders, but his long walk says much about modern life. And so many of our bad habits are American in origin, certainly where food is concerned.

This is where the Sunny Delight comes in. In 1999, Sunny D was a marketing phenomenon, topping the soft-drink league after an advertising campaign that played on its healthfulness. Never mind that the original recipe contained five per cent juice, along with sugar, water, vegetable oil, added flavourings and so forth.

Now plummeting sales have seen Sunny D taken off the shelves at Asda. At the same time, Northern Foods, mass producer of biscuits, pies, frozen pizzas and supermarket ready meals, has issued a profit warning.

As is surely happening with Nestl here in York, the company is being hit by the trend for healthier food.

Steve Vaught knows what happens if you eat too much fat-saturated, sugar-soaked rubbish (and how it pains me to sound like the human husk woman off You Are What You Eat). As he says on his website: "Being fat is physically and emotionally painful. It diminishes the quality of the good things in life and it will ultimately bring about an early demise. So being overweight darkens every good thing that you achieve in your life and even prevents some things from happening at all."

That's what he wrote on setting out. Now he has 600 miles to go before hobbling into New York.

Keep walking, Steve.

Updated: 09:05 Thursday, March 16, 2006