seeing as not everyone agreed with my views on fat people, i thought i would back up my thoughts with an article i found in the Daily Mail. This guy is a legend. read it and weep....
How many fat people have you seen today? Did the milkman waddle down your garden path on legs like giant kebabs?
Did the chap in the newsagent where you bought this paper and sweat as he put your money in the till with his pudgy hand?
Is your husband, even now, forking another sausage into his puddingy face? Perhaps you yourself are — how can I put this politely? — 'fuller-figured'. In which case, you may want to stop reading now. As for the rest of you, stop looking so smug.
Because has it ever occurred to you that porkers aren't just putting pressure on their elasticated waistbands — they're costing the whole country money as well.
And the bill is not just a few pounds here and there to repair a broken park bench or the odd public loo seat. Last year, treatment of obesity-related illnesses, including Type 2 diabetes and knee and hip operations, cost the National Health Service — wait for it — £1billion.
Another £2.5 billion was lost to the economy on account of premature death, sick pay and incapacity benefits related to obesity.
Extra transport costs incurred as a result of our increasing weight ran to £250 million because the fatter we grow, the fewer people can fit on any given bus or train. (By 2020, when a third of Britons will be clinically obese, 2,500 extra buses will have to be built, at a cost of £100,000 per bus, to cart our bulkier frames around.)
'Most chubbies lack the willpower to maintain a healthier lifestyle'
There are 900 people in Britain so fat that they can do, almost literally, nothing at all. These super-whoppers cost the country £8million just on their own. And where does this money — almost £4billion — come from? From the taxes paid by thin, healthy people like me. People with a bit of self-control. People who are able to say 'no thanks, I'm full' when offered second helpings of pud.
People who have the basic self-discipline required to walk past a High Street pie shop a couple of hours after lunch without nipping in for a couple of steak and kidneys and a gallon of fizzy pop.
I should stress at this point that there is a tiny percentage of people with genuine metabolic problems that cause them to pile on the pounds. They, of course, deserve sympathy rather than contempt.
But the vast majority of chubbies in Britain are big because they lack the willpower or incentive to maintain a healthier lifestyle. We're paying for their self-indulgence. And I'm sorry, but I just don't think it's fair. Smokers are expected to pay vast amounts in tax to fund their habit. Boozers are taxed in the same way; gamblers, too.
And I think it's high time the obese were made to stump up as well. The time has come to tax the fat. It may sound harsh. It may sound a bit 'nanny state'. It may even, in its apparently cavalier attitude to human rights, strike you as mildly fascistic.
But I'm afraid it is the only way. I don't say this on a whim. I've just finished filming a TV documentary in which I travelled the land talking to health experts, politicians and economists in a bid to find possible solutions to our fat crisis.
I spent time listening to the overweight justify their size. I even wore a fat suit in public for two days to gauge other people's reactions (never again — the stigma was unbearable). And along the way, I discovered some scary stuff. I didn't know, for example, that two-thirds of the adult population of Britain was already overweight, with a Body Mass Index of more than 25, or obese, with a BMI more than 30. (You can calculate your own BMI by dividing your weight in kilos by your height in metres squared.)
'The Government pays lip-service to the notion of better nutrition'
I didn't know that, on average, Britons have put on six pounds in weight each over the past ten years. I didn't know that almost 10 per cent of all premature deaths in this country are obesity-related, or that by 2010 obesity will overtake smoking as the biggest preventable killer. YES, obesity is a time-bomb, threatening to blow us all away.
And what is the Government doing about it? It is saying 'Oh, jolly good' every Jamie Oliver makes a TV programme about healthy eating. It is paying lip-service to the notion of better nutrition education and hammering away with its ludicrous 'five fruit and veg portions a day' campaign, which nobody understands. Do potatoes count as a veg? What about baked beans?
How many bean sprouts are in a portion? The five portions are as incomprehensible as those five tests which Britain has to pass to join the euro and which nobody understands except Gordon Brown.
And it's based on the same principle: New Labour's routine offer of obfuscation and cant in response to every crisis. We're dying of obesity, and the Government gives us gimmicks. The time has come to give people no option but to lose weight.
Not by making obesity illegal, and punishable by law, of course, but by making them pay for it themselves. And I'm not talking about putting a tax on sugar, as the Lib Dems once suggested. Nor do I intend to place a tax on food according to fat content, as has sometimes been mooted. Why should I have to pay extra for a commodity which, in moderation, does me no harm at all?
I don't want to pay more for a bag of chips just because two-thirds of our population are unable to regulate their own consumption of them. The only way is to tax the fat directly, tailoring each individual's tax bill to reflect their girth, which is to say, their fat burden on the rest of us.
In consultation with a panel of tax experts for the documentary, I came up with a relatively simple equation whereby an individual's annual tax liability would be linked to their BMI. I won't detain you with the actual mathematical formula. Suffice it to say that if, for example, your BMI was 36 (just over halfway between 'obese' and 'morbidly obese' — roughly the size of John Prescott) you would pay 6 per cent more tax than a person built the way God intended.
So if you currently pay £5,000 a year in tax then, under my system, you would pay £5,300. It's not a perfect solution, of course.
There's a lot of fine-tuning to be done. ('How often will people be weighed?' I hear you ask. 'What about those whose weight frequently fluctuates?') But as an outline plan, as a bit of blue-sky thinking amid the oppressive clouds of Westminster guff, I believe a fat tax has got real potential.
'Fat people tell me the overweight are a minority group'
Not only would it raise the money we need to offset the economic burden of the fat (while lowering tax bills for the rest of us), it would also, as in the case of taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, act as a deterrent. Some people — all of them fat — told me during the course of filming that this was an infringement of their human rights. But so is insisting that people drive within the speed limit and avoid dropping litter.
Fat people tell me that I am prejudiced and that the overweight are a 'minority group' as deserving of respect as any other.
I beg to differ. Being fat is a choice. A choice to consume dwindling resources, to use more energy, to take up more space.
If you can afford to do that, fine. You're free, in our society, to be antisocial, out of breath and physically unprepossessing if you can pay for the pleasure yourself. But if you can't afford it, I'm sure as hell not paying.
And, believe me, it is a choice. The fat people I interviewed for the film were always telling me they couldn't change their size. A moment's research soon proved this was tosh.
People said: 'I'm not fat, I'm just big-boned.' Nonsense. Have you ever seen a fat skeleton?
They said: 'I've got a slow metabolism.' Piffle. Fat people, if anything, have higher metabolisms than the rest of us because of the amount of effort it takes to haul their bulk around.
They told me: 'It's genetic.' Poppycock. What fat children inherit from fat parents is bad eating habits, not fat bellies.
They said: 'Obesity is a disease of the poor. The lower social registers cannot afford to eat healthily.'
How patronising. In making the show, I debunked this myth by taking £20 (the bottom end of what a person on the minimum wage or standard benefits spends on food in a week) and buying more than an enough healthy food to last seven days.
I bought pounds of fresh vegetables (carrots, cabbage, beans), two pounds of organic beef, two salmon steaks, four pounds of whole-wheat pasta, two pounds of porridge, two pints of semi-skimmed organic milk, bags of pulses, four tins of tomatoes, two sacks of oranges and a sack of apples.
In the past, my weight has crept up past 13st'
And where do you think I bought all this? An open-air market in the East End? A discount warehouse in the Glasgow?
No, Sainsbury's in Islington. And I've got the receipt to prove it.
All you have to do is a little cooking. We did it for 10,000 years, so why stop now? Why do people instead prefer to spend £20 on two giant takeaway pizzas and a lethal torpedo of fizzy pop?
I don't know. But I know that if it's going to cost you hundreds of pounds in extra tax, you might think twice about it.
My own BMI fluctuates between 24.1 and 26.2. Which is to say either side of the border that defines healthy and overweight.
In the past, my weight has crept up past 13st which, at only 5ft 9in, has made my BMI even higher. You could say I have struggled with my weight. But a smidgeon of self-respect has always brought me back down.
For Heaven's sake, I'm a food critic. I am paid to eat as much as I can in the finest restaurants. I eat out at least ten times a week. If anyone should be obese, it's me.
BUT here's the thing: by taking a little exercise and using moderation, I keep my weight under control. I rarely have pudding. If I've had a big lunch I may skip dinner altogether.
I cycle as often as possible to the restaurants I visit (as well as going swimming for the occasional half-hour and playing the odd game of cricket).
By these simple measures, I have been able to lead the most epicurean life imaginable and have never let my waist measurement go above 32 inches.
So why can't everyone do the same? Why is it that fat people refuse to take the blame upon themselves?
During filming, I went to Norwich to meet one of Britain's fattest men, Paul Mason, who currently weighs 47st (having reached a high of 65st in the past).
Paul has not got out of bed for eight years and his care costs the public purse £100,000 a year.
And that's not counting the two special vehicles built by St John Ambulance (at a cost of £100,000 each) to ferry him, and a handful of people like him, to and from hospital for the check-ups and treatment needed to keep him alive.
When I asked him what should be done about it, I was flabbergasted to hear him say: 'Something has to be done. But we can't do it, people like me. We can't physically do it.'
So you can see. The obesity crisis in Britain is a product of the terrible clash between the victim mentality and the 'Oprah culture' that says we must be proud of what we are, whatever we are.
Dawn French, the actress, is a classic example. She recently claimed she was a better role model than skinny supermodels who, she said, encourage girls to be anorexic. But she is wrong. Massive deviation from the normal body shape is unhealthy and dangerous, whichever direction you go in.
They are simply two sides of the same coin. Her insistence that a woman can be fat and beautiful is fair enough. And she was a good example of this for many years.
But she is now huge, in imminent danger of terrible health breakdown, and to encourage young women to think that this is acceptable is irresponsible in the extreme.
We must make people aware of the damage they are doing to their health by being grossly overweight. And by far the most effective way to do this is to hit them where it hurts — in their wallets. It worked with smoking. And I firmly believe it would work with obesity.
So I took my 'fat tax' formula to MPs in an attempt to win them round. Some poured scorn on the idea, others were intrigued.
Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, was one of the former. She panicked at the sight of my camera and claimed my proposals 'sounded a bit Big Brother', insisting that the Government was already doing enough with its 'five portions' campaign.
But the Conservative MP David Amess, who has worked tirelessly in the area of obesity, was fascinated with the idea, agreeing to table a question in the House of Commons.
Better still, I decided to take my plan straight to the top — to the big man himself, John Prescott. And when, finally, I managed to secure a seat at lunch with the Deputy Prime Minister, guess what?
Between mouthfuls of lamb curry in the Cabinet Office canteen, he agreed that a fat tax had real possibility, saying: 'Yes, you're right. There is something in that.
'We've got to change the culture of the way of eating. I think we're moving in some of these directions anyway.'
It was only when I pressed him further, asking him to promise that he would put my fat tax proposal to his colleagues in the next Cabinet meeting, that he appeared to waver.
'Well, we'll see about that,' he said. 'We've got enough bloody problems at the moment.'
As it turned out, his problems were only just beginning. But perhaps it had dawned on Mr Prescott that he himself would be among the first to be taxed under my proposal.
Perhaps he feared a rebellion from his own constitutents: Hull has one of the highest levels of obesity in the country.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, Prezza and his pals will take their snouts out of the trough long enough to realise that inertia is no longer an option.
Britain is dying of fat. And while tax may be a bitter pill for tubbies to swallow (nothing like as yummy as an extra helping of treacle pud) I believe it's the only cure that will work.
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