And chocolate burns calories

I know my intolerance is showing whenever the subject of obesity comes up, but this latest wave of news reports insisting you can be fat and healthy really can’t go uncontested. If the only worry in life were heart disease, sure, the newest gainfully underwritten study would be the greatest development since the motorized scooter. But as I gimp around the city, I see untold hordes limping even worse merely because they are, in the immortal words of a letter-writer to USA Today a couple of years ago, carrying around Cadillac bodies on VW Bug frames. And every time I think about porking out, I remember the whale of a woman at PT who tried to climb onto an exercise bike and nearly pulled the thing over onto herself. The message that went out this week from even the vaunted NYTimes was very clear: Eat up. Probably no one detected the “get on the treadmill” second graf. For all the government intervention in Americans’ eating habits, it’s amazing no one has come up with the best deterrent to gluttony yet: Hang a set of crutches next to the Ben & Jerry’s case and make sure anyone who wants to buy a few pints of Chubby Hubby can first actually walk the length of the aisle on them. Now imagine trying to move fast enough to get out of the way of a speeding car (or a crazy gun guy in church) or through the door of a crashing airplane. There’s more than one way to die by fat. . . .