Beef yourself up
* Consume more calories
* Join the fat club
* No pain, just gain
Imagine a world where fat people are heroes. We’re not talking about those carrying the odd extra pound. No, it’s the outright blobsome who will be the true idols of the future. At last you can breathe a long sigh of relief, stop holding in your tummy and throw out your control pants. Obese people are essential in any quest to f**k the planet. Celebrate by becoming one! Fat people don’t need a manual to find out how to chew this planet up and spit it right back out; they just do what comes naturally.
Once you’ve stepped off the scales for good, you must ensure that everyone else does too. Make sure that people become so fat that they can barely walk, that they morph into folk who have to drive to the bottom of the garden and order a taxi to cross the street. Encourage everyone to lie around watching television in their over-heated homes. Make them feel proud to be a burden not only to the state, but to the entire planet. Pump resources into looking after them as if you were rearing geese for the finest foie gras and ensure they feel like a valued part of society. Extol the virtues of eating big, big dinners; encourage them to hunt out the most high-calorie, high-carbon, wasteful meals around.
Currently, two-thirds of UK adults and a third of children are overweight or obese. Ministers predict that, without government action, this figure could rise to almost nine in ten adults and two-thirds of children by 2050. But the drive to real portliness has yet to start. The planet’s most obese country offers us a clear lesson on what is possible. The US is constantly raising the bar on what can be achieved by high car-ownership, calorie-dense fodder and cheap energy. There, the average citizen consumes 19 tonnes of carbon a year. By contrast, Britons use 10.25. Whichever way you look at it, the situation is becoming embarrassing.
Soon enough, the rakish forms of sustainable-living types will become so rare they will be looked upon as walking freakshows, and not just because they are still walking. Anorexia will be defined by any adult below a size sixteen. In your vision of the future, models will waddle along reinforced catwalks. There will be no size discrimination then; the human form will be infinitely beautiful. And the more of it, the better.
Consider the following question: ‘Are YOU man enough?’ When Burger King unveiled this slogan as part of their advertising campaign, their appeal to masculine pride (not forgetting stomach-minded feminists) was brilliantly devised to promote the Double Whopper With Cheese. A delightful little offering, the product offered a neat 923 calories in one fast sitting. A typical man would need to walk 9 miles to burn off a Whopper, though once you’ve started gorging on this modest feast, 9 metres will seem an achievement. Sales of the burger could go through the roof. A strict diet, centred around this sublime creation, is what you must recommend to help Britain’s collective waistline expand at a gratifying rate. Most of the UK population lives a reasonably short drive from one of the chain’s 650 branches, so everybody can join in. No excuses please. Globally, Burger King has 11,220 outlets serving 77 million people weekly in sixty-one countries – an okay start, but one hopes that increased Whopper demand will stimu-late a fresh phase of international expansion. Of course, all new branches will be drive-through outlets, as the concept of passing trade on foot becomes increasingly laughable.
Try not to settle for just the 380-gram Double Whopper With Cheese. Order large fries and a cola to ensure a combined calorie injection of around 1,500, almost the daily recommended intake for a woman and nearly two-thirds that for a man. Followers of your diet should aim to use seventy out of their ninety main meals a month in proving they are man enough. Though, be warned, we don’t want you going all Morgan Spurlock on us. The original king of the burger, 37-year-old Spurlock filmed a documentary entitled Super Size Me, which chronicled his month of eating only at McDonald’s. He was sick on the second day. By the end of the month he had gained an extra chin and grossly enlarged his liver. It’s not an ideal approach. Followers of your diet must stay healthy enough to live and ideally should retain their appetite, so supplement the Whopper diet with out-of-season fruit and vegetables imported from the other hemisphere.
Take a look at your beefy accomplice in its finest detail. The bap is reassuringly generous in carbohydrates while the gherkin is flown in especially from California to provide nutrition. The burger itself offers a reasonable return of 57 grams in fat, more than half the daily allowance, of which 13 grams are saturated and 2 grams are trans-fat, a form that is not digested normally by the body and may increase cholesterol. Don’t worry. If you do get poorly from cardiovascular disease or diabetes, or suffer respiratory complaints, go straight to hospital. Southampton General Hospital is recommended, chiefly because it once conveniently installed a Burger King on its premises. There’s no reason why hospitalization should come between you and your burger. Keep an eye on your children: chronic obesity means that some might die before you do and, if the planet somehow outlives the current generation, you are going to have to keep your over-sized youngsters alive to carry on the work you have so diligently started. If your fattest offspring are finding their dietary demands a struggle, drive them to the children’s ward at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where every Saturday it is Burger King Takeout Night.
Time to spread the word. Instigate a campaign on a social-networking site. Petition to get ‘Are YOU man enough?’ back on television screens. A similar campaign to save the Wispa chocolate bar worked like a dream. Be quick-minded. The government is currently considering whether to apply the 9 p.m. watershed to adverts encouraging fast foods. The Spanish government even attempted to ban Burger King’s advert itself. Health campaigners complained that it promoted ‘excessive consumption’, which, surely, is the point. Burger King maintain that it is all about choice, which, in a capitalist democracy, seems to be fair enough.
Watching television shouldn’t come at a cost to your burgeoning waistline or carbon footprint. Follow these simple steps to maximize returns:
1. Push sofa into centre of lounge (being careful to avoid overexertion).
2. Arrange pile of remote controls by your side.
3. Turn on large plasma television.
4. Activate surround-system and seventeen micro-speakers.
5. Switch on other wide-screen televisions (hooked up to DVD player and games console). Mute them.
6. Activate central heating full-blast, ensuring you strip beforehand if it’s summer. Sweating might result in you shedding weight, and that must be avoided.
7. Order a takeaway or remind a like-minded friend that it is their turn to post a BK Whopper meal through your letterbox.
To keep your mind active whilst lying on the sofa you regularly delight in mental arithmetic. You know that for every journey under 3 miles for which you don’t walk, you add another couple of kilos to your carbon total. Similarly, you understand that you can quadruple weekly energy use by never turning off the central heating. You will never go near a bicycle again after recently discovering that a 20 per cent increase in cycling would reduce Britain’s carbon emissions by 35,000 tonnes and turn your calf muscles into toned monstrosities. After all that exertion you will probably fancy some sleep. It’s worth investing in an eye mask and earplugs to drown out the electrical appliances and lights in your home, which are eternally left on.
Regardless of how many participate in the Whopper diet, obesity rates will assuredly grow. More sugar is being added to processed food all the time, with studies revealing that the amount has doubled in the past three decades. Appetite for self- as well as for planetary-destruction will not dissipate, despite new schemes being hatched by the government. Attempts to get a simple ‘traffic light’ labelling scheme introduced on to packaging of convenience foods is being admirably resisted in Brussels because of fervent lobbying by food activists including Tesco. For that, as for so many other things, you can be grateful to Britain’s biggest supermarket.
Government predictions estimate that, by 2050, obesity will cost the UK a whopping £34 billion, a satisfyingly grand amount that will be diverted away from tackling environmental breakdown and a figure 170 times larger than the sum earmarked for developing international research on climate change. As time drags on you will find yourself increasingly up against the health police, but as Britain is already in thrall to fast food, no matter what, they’ll never be able to ban the burger. Approach every supper as your last and perhaps you really can consume the planet.
* In late 2010 an inquest hears how 6-year-old twins from Manchester have died from over-eating. Coroner describes their bodies as being embalmed in fat. Likely.
* Burger King, whose international outlets have topped the 17,000 mark, unveils the Goddess (With Cheese) in 2013. Half a metre high, with 1,400 calories, the burger takes the world by storm. Plausible.
* The World Health Organization condemns fast-food chains for ‘crippling’ a generation. Probable.
* By 2020, more than a third of European adults are diabetic or have breathing problems due to weight issues. Almost certain.
* Mass overhaul of bus, train and plane seating dimensions announced in 2015 after majority of people can no longer sit down due to girth issues. Steel-supported beds become the norm. Feasible.
Likelihood of three-quarters of adults in Western countries being diagnosed overweight or obese by 2020: 89%