Dr James Le Fanu: weight issues

By Dr James Le Fanu Published: 4:06PM GMT 04 March 2010

Dr James Le Fanu Photo: PHILIP HOLLIS

1,200 Extra calories a day an eight-year-old cooking compared to a kid on fight rations

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The new story of five-year old Lucy Davies marked down as "overweight" after a propagandize health check suggested she fell only one per cent outward the "normal" range, reflects the most absurdities of the stream mania with weight issues. Indeed, fatness has most to praise it. The plump are less disposed to infections and some-more expected to tarry a heart attack, whilst plump oldies are less expected to humour from crisp bones, or hypothermia if incompetent to compensate their heating bills.

The consequential cause is not weight per se but the grade of fitness, as suggested by a new investigate of 12,000 American Veterans. The overweight but fit, it turns out, have a 10-fold improved opinion than the thin but unfit.

The ramifications of this "obesity paradox" as it has been dubbed, is serve illuminated by the erotically appealing comment of a Somerset womans childhood as a "fatty" at a boarding propagandize in Malaya prior to the war. Her day proposed with a mile walk, crocodile fashion, followed by an English breakfast porridge, bacon, eggs and oven oven baked beans. There were lessons until the midmorning mangle of gym exercises.

Lunch was nonetheless some-more English stodge (meat pies, steamed and oven oven baked puddings) followed by a twohour siesta, some-more lessons and a light repast of bread, butter, Marmite.

On this system of administration everybody solely herself was possibly thin or of normal weight but it did not forestall her winning the crater for Junior Gym Champion. Come the Japanese advance she was propitious to shun to Australia and a less farinaceous diet at that point she soon lost 3 mill to become, for the initial time, a well-developed teenager.

James.LeFanu@telegraph.co.uk