Friday, December 15, 2006

No More Truffle Shuffle

The NHS may go bankrupt from treating big-boned Britain.

Experts, including government A&E tsar George Alberti and Glasgow University professor Naveed Sattar, said obesity treatment took up 9% of the NHS budget. But they warned this would rise as the number of obese adults rose from one in five to one in three by 2010.

A&E tsar?
Anyway, so many Britons will be indistinguishable from the whale that beached in Moray that drastic measures are being proposed, including an advice hotline for the obese on XXL clothes:

The number should be promoted on the labels of all clothes sold with a waist of more than 40in (102cm) for men, 37in (94cm) for boys, 35in (88cm) for women, and 31in (80cm) for girls.

This is all very well, but I don't think it goes far enough. If you're going to humiliate people, do it properly. What about these ideas to stop the lardarses in their tracks?

  1. Have all the sugary, fattening food in supermarkets kept in very narrow aisles, so that fat people cannot physically access the turkey twizzlers and chocolate coated fishfingers they gorge themselves on.
  2. Keep clothes for fat people (in the sizes described above) on solid iron - let's say 5kg - coathangers. As they struggle to lift them off the rack, they get a free workout.
  3. Put all the large sizes at the end of a long corridor so that chubby and friends have to walk further to get them. Or, better, on the top floor of a department store and set all the escalators to "down" so they've got to run up to reach them. You could do the same with the sweets.
  4. I'm picturing a large seesaw, or similar Crystal Maze type contraption, on the edge of a pit or similar abyss. At one end is the fat person, at the other is their target food or clothing. They shuffle (waddle?) closer to the pivot, but the seesaw starts to tip away from them. What should they do? Something like the end of The Italian Job.
  5. Bouncy castles in gyms. Let's make exercise fun!
  6. Offer everyone who is obese £2000 to lose the flab: £1000 to be paid after a few months, when they reach their target weight and another £1000 a year later if they keep it off. That'll cost less than a stomach staple. Actually, that's not such a stupid idea.

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