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Street Philosopher

Bear-Faced in Bombay

Seán Moran philosophically ponders plumptiousness.

The fussy bear in my photograph will only attack once it has confirmed you’re worth eating, it seems. If I stepped onto the weighing machine, I would surely pass his test: at the moment I’m trying to lose the ‘covid stone’ that many of us put on during lockdown. (A stone is an archaic measure of weight equal to fourteen imperial pounds, or just over six kilos.) Unlike the fabled ‘philosopher’s stone’ that transmuted base metal into gold, the covid stone was caused by our bodies transmuting weeks of overeating and underactivity into flab.

This is only the latest rise in a long-term global trend: more and more of the human race are becoming overweight or obese.

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