Dieting

No pensioner should be trying to lose weight, as you’ll need all the body fat you can muster to keep warm when you can’t afford to pay for your heating. That said, being morbidly obese is obviously unhealthy, and if you feel you need to eat less, there’s a plethora of diets from which to choose. The vast majority of these are completely useless and principally designed to help someone who once appeared on a television programme you never watched to gain pounds at your expense.

Diets proposed by people who used to sit on a sofa in a television studio will have little value, as will those devised by morbidly thin women with phoney medical qualifications who advise studying the contents of your toilet every morning.

Joining a diet club is a good way of meeting other fat people and becoming clinically depressed, but bear in mind that the main way they work is by being so expensive to join that you don’t have any money left for food.

Most proprietary diet aids are pink and bubbly, so can be quickly dismissed, while those pretending to be real food are made of quorn and covered in acrylic paint.

Diets that rely on the consumption of one particular type of food, such as cabbage, lentils or elastic bands, are usually sponsored by the producers of those items, and signing up to any of them will inevitably lead to a massive increase in junk mail offering low-cost coach trips to the cabbage fields of East Anglia, 101 alternative uses for elastic bands and adopt-a-lentil schemes in third world countries.