After yesterday's gruesome experience Frog and I decide to repair to the pub for lunch. As predicted, the place is full of solicitors talking about their body mass indices. The Law Society must have bought into a Weightwatchers franchise. Unfortunately, we're sat next to a particularly noisy specimen.
"Do you know, I'm five foot eleven and seventeen stone three but according to my BMI I'm clinically obese."
Well, yes matey. I'm taller than you and a stone and a half lighter and I'm fat. No two ways about it.
"And smoking...! Do you know, when you take a drag on a cigarette you breath in three trillion free radicals. Three trillion! Can you imagine that? Three trillion!"
No, of course he can't. Even if it's just an American trillion it would take him a thousand years just to count it, assuming that he doesn't do boring things like sleep or eat or die. A trillion is an idea in the mind of a mathematician. It always puzzled me that anybody had to 'invent' the googol. I can only imagine that they used to run out of ink at the ninety-ninth zero.
In the end Frog has enough of this nonsense. He leans back in his chair, pats his midriff bulge and says, in his best stage whisper:
"I've taken on board Gordon Brown's advice about not wasting food."
3 comments:
Three trillion free radicals, eh? I suspect they just tell us mumbo-jumbo most the time. It's tempting to start a You're As Fat You Feel movement, where you can be whatever shape you like as long as your “body image” is healthy. But sadly this would only work for people who are not really too fat or too skinny.
A Physiology lecturer once explained it to me, back in the days when I was size minus seven: "Getting fat's simple, lad, mouth 'ole is bigger than the bum 'ole."
Ah, yes, that'll do it! Though I've found the way to avoid putting on too much weight is to move to a country where the food is rubbish - Romania in my case. I really can't eat fried pork and mashed potatoes continually. Though I have to try continually, for the sake of politeness.
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