How to handle weighty matters

• Poking fun at fat people is the only acceptable form of discrimination, for public derision is the best form of incentive to help someone lose weight. So, mock your fat friends — as they chase after you to eat you, they will be exercising

By and lard, it is okay to pork fun at fat people, isn’t it? I have always done this. I’m quite good at this sacred national pastime, actually. The reason it is okay to make fun of fat people is that being overweight is largely due to personal behaviour, not fate.

Fat is fatigue, a medical fatwa, fatuous and, in the end, fatal. Nowadays, it gets dressed in all sorts of niceties, like ‘big-boned’ and ‘well fed’, but fat chance of ever making it ‘cool’.

Fat is not sexy. It is sextonian. Plus it’s not in your genes (but your jeans). It’s down to your own habits and does not run in the family. If that is your defence, I would like to suggest that maybe it is hoggish greed and not fat that runs through your family.

Poking fun at fat people is the only acceptable form of discrimination, for public derision is the best form of incentive to help someone lose weight.

So, mock your fat friends — as they chase after you to eat you, they will be exercising. And fat is too costly to the economy... in medical bills and extra fuel to carry peoples’ three chins around.

Plus, in a country that is periodically asphyxiated by food shortages, it is not prudent to walk around looking larger than life as people debate where all the country’s food reserves mysteriously vanished to. It is unsightly, offensive and intimidating.

That was my view until last week, when I realised I had gained weight.

I was just strolling around my neighbourhood — okay, “waddling” is more appropriate — and passed by a nursery school. As soon as the little devils saw me, they all burst into chorus: “Georgy podgy, pudding and pie….”

I’m sure it was deliberate — an unprovoked, unnecessary move. Mean kids. Where is King Herod when you need him? (As a result, I now fully condone corporal punishment for all minors. Bring back the birch, I say, that will learn them. And next week I’ll write a polemic on the importance of regularly flogging your child).

Truth is, after subsisting on flat, fat-free rations at the university mess, I was at home enjoying the benefit of my mother’s culinary skills. I know every one is a good cook, but, seriously, my mother is the Michelangelo of gastronomy. Therefore I have gained a few kilos from eating a lot.

I was a lardy lad. I was always a skinny kid, and now I feel I am on the road to becoming a full blown — very full blown — adult. Tell me, do I look fat in the byline photo on the left?

Obesity is becoming a consuming —literally — worry of our age, a growing problem and a weighty subject not to be taken lightly.

We eat more, exercise less and spend time in desk-bound jobs gathering blood clots. Just as the Allies did in ’44 during Hitler’s ill-fated westward expansion, many of us face the Battle of the Bulge, and, just as they did, we will suffer casualties along the way.

I lack the willpower to adequately police my voracious appetite. It is hard to say no to good food. The human tongue is predisposed to favour the taste of fat, sugar and salt. All three are bad news for your health, but they all taste like ambrosia.

The greatest battles most people face are against their waistlines and panty lines. Giving in to your carnal consuming nature is so much easier. I have no beef with fat people — because they ate it all — but I am, as it were, uncomfortable with my newfound girth.

With the shoe on the other foot, I see things from the other side. Fat is actually good for us.

For starters, fat people cannot follow fashion. Fashion, as you know, is a tyrannical and whimsical world filled with credulous cretins who think their clothes actually offer glimpses to their non-existent personalities.

Modelling is a parallel existence inhabited by emaciated, vain, bulimic hypochondriacs, and their sole purpose is to make other women feel inadequate.

Fashion hates fat people, and if all of us were fat, we would only have runways for planes and no one would struggle to keep up with the a la mode Joneses.

If we all gave in to our inner glutton, we will have a range of diseases by 40, and have heart-attacks before we hit retirement. This will negate the need to contribute to the Pension Fund that so many hate.

Being fat will also reduce, drastically, the number of STD transmissions. This is because we will be too fat and lazy to roll over or organise salacious rendezvous. Aids has a cliché preventative: ‘ABCD’, with ‘E’ for ‘empowerment of women’. ‘F’ must be for ‘fat’, because when you are fat you are less attractive and less susceptible to offers for a roll in the hay.

Teenage pregnancies will drop too. Plus you will float better in water.

So there, I said something positive about being big.

Now, where is that sausage?”