Weighty bollocks

How nice of Michael Duffy to bring this to our attention.

'One in four Australian children and one in two adults are already overweight or obese," the Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, told a conference of obesity experts this week.

In the last place that I worked, we had two seriously obese people. Out of about 80 staff.

In my current work place, where the floor that I am on has about 80 staff, none are obese. None.

I have yet to see a chubby struggling to get into the lift in the morning. There appear to be no obese people at all in our building, which must have about 1000 people working in it. No fatties at all!

Now things were quite different just down the road at one of my old places of work. That building was stuffed full of public servants of one sort or another, and the cardigans and waddlers were a common sight. The food hall was just a sea of gibbletting flesh from one end to the other.

My bus run always included at least two or three chubba-lords, mainly because they always chose to sit next to me. But three out of a bus capacity of 80 is not half the population.

I see the occasionally grossly pigged out person at the supermarket - there was a lady there last night that had trouble fitting through the checkout aisle. She was that wide. But she was also that rare.

As Duffy says, are they all in hiding? Or are the standards that are being used to judge people so out of whack that Kylie Minogue and Paris Hilton would be judged as being overweight?

I am over these obesity scare stories. Having to sit next to a guts-ahoy type person once a day on the bus does not an epidemic make.