Evelyn Waugh isn’t really the sort of chap you’d imagine doing zumba. Nevertheless, his famous quote about New York fittingly describes many of the city’s gyms: “There is neurosis in the air, which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”

Waugh’s words are certainly true of my local gym, where a number of minute Manhattanites seem to run solely on nervous energy. There is one particularly angular woman I see whenever I work out, no matter the time of the day. By my (admittedly unrigorous) calculations, she must spend three hours a day pounding the StairMaster, and clearly has an unhealthy obsession with exercise. Yet I doubt that any of the gym staff members have said anything to her. When I broached the idea of exercise addiction with a personal trainer, he scoffed at the very idea, “it’s like calling a person who drinks water every day a water addict!” In a society where obesity is so closely associated to morbidity, “training too much” is rarely considered an issue.

It’s currently estimated that about 39-48% of people who suffer from eating disorders also suffer from exercise addiction. The skeletal StairMasterer is a fixture of so many gyms that satirical website the Onion once had an article called Anorexic Woman At Gym Looking Good. But you don’t have to be bulimic, anorexic or even thin for a preoccupation with exercise to become an addiction in the most debilitating sense of the word; it’s just rarely considered a problem when it’s not accompanied with an eating disorder. While we might reference “exercise addicts” in popular discourse, we seldom put these people in the same category as alcoholics or meth-heads. Being called a “gym junkie” tends to be considered something of a compliment; being called a “junkie”, on the other hand, is decidedly not.

While exercise addiction isn’t yet recorded on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders there is, as any runner can tell you, a physical element to the exercise habit. In the glamorously named study Rat Model of Activity-Based Anorexia, researchers at Tufts University, Massachusetts, found that running may be addictive to the brain in the same way as heroin. And exercise definitely is the drug of choice amongst a certain spectrum of society. Indeed, for my part, running is the nearest thing I’ve got to anything resembling a religion.

But while the idea that exercise can be physically addictive is old news, it could be argued that a new sort of exercise addiction is emerging; one that is closely correlated to how the concept of “exercise” itself is changing.

Since the commercialisation of fitness in the late 1970s, society has gone about commoditising and branding physical activity. It has turned it from an action we do into a product we consume (it’s also worth noting that exercise addictions are often combined with shopping addictions). Cosmo Duff Gordon, founder of Start2Stop, an exclusive addiction treatment programme in London, notes that “the category of addiction has been progressively extended since the 1890s to include two of capitalism’s most prized behaviours, work and consumption”.

And so the value of a workout is increasingly not measured by how it makes us feel, but in how many calories we burn and, more importantly, how much we pay for the privilege. Recent years have seen the emergence of a number of lucrative fitness franchises, from bikram yoga to CrossFit to zumba to what is the only way to sweat at the moment: SoulCycle.

If you aren’t yet acquainted with SoulCycle you’re not missing much, except the chance to pay a large amount of money to cycle indoors, in the dark, with skinny strangers. The 45-minute spin class, priced at a minimum of $34 (£22) a session, has become so popular in New York that getting your butt on a bike is harder than getting a table at Noma (well, pre-norovirus). The crowd of waiting list hopefuls by the candle-lit front desks has become so thick that people have had their hair catch fire. And by the way, if you’re reading this in Britain and wondering when you too can shed excess pounds with SoulCycle – it’ll be coming to London in 2014.

Fitness and addiction have both become billion-dollar industries and, as they grow, they seem to be growing closer together. Indeed it might not be long before we see the emergence of a 12-step programme for exercise addiction. Just, um, maybe not on a StairMaster.

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