I may be fat but I’m still in pretty good nick. STOP LECTURING ME.

Okay look this is really just a Sunday morning rant. I have noticed that people who are slim sort of assume, without thinking about it, that they are healthier than people who are fat.

I’m not sure that that is strictly true.

Yesterday morning the internet shopping arrived.

(a) Natural yogurt, cured ham, light cheddar, Philadelphia light. Cornichons, olives, onions in brine. Chopped tomatoes, fresh wholewheat pasta, tins of soup and beans.

(b) Fresh salad leaves, cucumber, aubergine, green peppers, skinless chicken breasts, neck fillet of lamb, lean mince, tofu.

(c) Ham and cheese pastry slices, steak pies, Scotch eggs, bacon, full-fat sausages, Meat Feast Pizza, chocolate-cream-filled profiteroles and a fresh cream Victoria Sandwich.

This is shopping for me (Licensed Porketeer), my mother (overweight) and my little brother (5′11 and 9 stone soaking wet).

So who’s going to eat what?

I’m willing to bet that if you were standing behind me and looked into my trolley at the supermarket, you’d look at my bum and then at the trolley and you’d zero in immediately on category (c). You wouldn’t stop to think about (a) and (b). You’d just shake your head with genial contempt, especially if you also saw the Weight Watchers magazine that I’d slung in there as an afterthought. You’d wonder how I thought I was ever going to lose weight sucking that sort of shit down on a 24/7 basis. But you’d be wrong. The fact is – I don’t touch (c), generally. I don’t feel like what’s in category (c) most of the time. It’s not that I don’t like that sort of stuff (although you can keep the Scotch eggs, and I’ll make the pastry myself, thanks) – I just don’t fancy it. Nor does my mother. We’ve always eaten far more from (a) and (b) than (c). We just eat too much of it.

Category (c) is for my little brother, who eats very little that is not processed. This is very bad for him because he has Aspergers and ADHD, which has been linked to particular E-numbers, but you try forcing a 28 year old man to eat what you want him to eat. If it isn’t a ready-meal or a ready-prepared snack of some description, he either fried it for breakfast or ordered it from KFC. On a typical day he’ll get out of bed at around 2pm, fry himself four slices of bacon, two eggs and a couple of sausages for breakfast with half a can of beans, then eat them with two slices of white bread and butter and wash the lot down with full-fat Coke or Fanta. At about 8pm he’ll come down again and microwave two ham and cheese slices or two steak pies, which he’ll eat with a Scotch egg. At some point after that, he’ll cut himself half of the Victoria sandwich. Throughout the day, he’ll dip into “his” chocolate box; he usually eats at least three full-sized bars of chocolate a day, and he’ll have a couple of bags of McCoys crisps too. But he’ll also eat whatever I’ve cooked for supper (usually long after it’s gone cold), provided it’s not spicy and doesn’t involve vegetables, in which case he’ll stick the Meat Feast pizza in the oven instead. He smokes 10-20 cigarettes a day and generally has 2-3 cans of lager a night. He rarely leaves his room, let alone the house, except to go to the newsagent for cigarettes, which is a ten minute walk.

I eat far more than 5 servings of fruit and veg a day, as does my mother. All of the meat we eat is lean and we almost always cook with olive oil, and then very sparingly. We make a point of having at least one day without meat or fish. We use spices and condiments to flavour our food. I cook most of what we eat from scratch and we tend to eat low-GI foods because we like them better. If we have any sort of pudding, it tends to be something like stewed fruit, or natural yogurt and honey, or a couple of fruit oatcakes with tea, or home-made low fat ice cream. I work out with a personal trainer three times a week and my mother does what exercise she can in her chair.

And yet, if I come home late from work and pick up a chicken shish kebab for us from the local Turkish on the way (skinless chicken breast cooked on a rack over charcoal, fat-free chilli sauce, pitta bread, undressed salad), my little brother whinges at length about how we’re “always eating unhealthy takeaways” and “we’ll never be thin if we eat that sort of rubbish”.

What I find interesting (and also pretty fucking annoying, but let’s keep it civil) is my little brother’s assumption that because he is thin he must also be healthier than we are. It’s an assumption shared by a lot of people who are slimmer than I am. If you are fat, people assume that you have a sweet tooth. They are astonished if you say no to pudding. They assume that you are having some sort of huge internal struggle or that you will go home and mainline chocolate for three hours.

My friend Joan, right? Her Smeg fridge contained six bottles of Moet, seven ready meals, seven chocolate mousses and a bag of salad. That’s all she ever bought. She had a block of Japanese knives that cost over £400 and the only thing she ever used them on was the cellophane on the ready-prepared cannelloni. She smoked “socially”. She regularly did cocaine. She drank at least a bottle of wine a night and always got bladdered on cocktails at the weekend. She bought family sized bars of chocolate on her way back from a night out and ate them in one go, drunk, standing at the kitchen counter. And yet she constantly lectured me about my unhealthy lifestyle.

Why? Because I’m fat and they’re thinner than me. And I’m getting a bit tired of this. Seriously. I am certainly bigger than most people. Believe it or not, I am aware of this. But at the same time – I may be carrying too much weight, but the weight that I am carrying is fundamentally good. It’s polyunsaturated, low-cholesterol, cooked-from-scratch. It’s organic, it’s lean, it’s free-range. It’s full of calcium, fibre, good carbs and vitamin C. It’s unadulterated by alcohol and tobacco and it can get through a spin class without keeling over. My dentist tells me I have the strongest bones he’s ever seen. My doctor tells me I have normal blood pressure, low bad cholesterol and high good cholesterol. My personal trainer tells me I have excellent flexibility and that I build muscle very easily.

I know I’m too big. Because of a congenital hip condition I have arthritis, knee and hip replacements and joint pain waiting for me further down the line. I don’t want to put my joints under any more pressure than they need to take and because of that I want to lose weight. But at the end of the day, even if I never lose another pound, I will be better off than my little brother when whatever magic elixir he’s imbibing wears off and leaves him with a chronic wheeze and a huge beer belly, and than Joan when her septum collapses and osteoporosis sets in.

I’m not saying I’m never going to be ill. But – to paraphrase Bill Hicks – thin people die every day.

So this is a message for Joan and Dmitri and anyone else who thinks that because they weigh less than me they are entitled to lecture me about my lifestyle:

FUCK OFF.

That is all.