Overweight

Con: You're endangering your health. Pro: I'm drought and famine resistant.

She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.

Who's your fat friend?

Being overweight (colloquially "fat") is having more body fat than is optimally healthy. Being overweight is especially common where food supplies are plentiful and lifestyles are sedentary.

Quotes

• Laugh and grow fat.
  • English saying, reported in Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, vol. 8, no. 17 (28 April 1855), p. 259, col. 3

• You think, because you're old and obese,
  To find in the furry civic robe ease?
  • Robert Browning, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", in Dramatic Lyrics (1842)

• Who's your fat friend?
  • George Bryan "Beau" Brummell, referring to the Prince Regent (later George IV), quoted in Captain Gronow's Reminiscences (1862)

• Fat is an oily dropsy.
  • Lord Byron to James Smith, quoted in The Albion, vol. 1, no. 31 (3 August 1833), p. 248

• Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
  • Hermann Goering (1936), translation quoted as an epigraph in R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Guns or Butter (1938)

• It is very injurious to health to take in more food than the constitution will bear, when, at the same time one uses no exercise to carry off this excess.
  • Hippocrates, as translated by James Mackenzie in The History of Health (1759), p. 91

• When you wish to laugh, you shall find me fat and sleek, with well-tended hide, a hog of Epicurus' herd.
  • Horace, Epistles, I, iv, as translated by M. F. Masom and A. F. Watt (1905)

• I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there is a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
  • George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939), part 1, chapter 3

• Persons of a gross relaxed habit of body, the flabby, and red-haired, ought always to use a drying diet. Such as are fat, and desire to be lean, should use exercise fasting; should drink small liquors a little warm; should eat only once a day, and no more than will just satisfy their hunger.
  • Polybus, as translated by James Mackenzie in The History of Health (1759), p. 130

• Dromio of Syracuse: ... I have but lean luck in the match, and yet is she a wondrous fat marriage.
  Antipholus of Syracuse: How dost thou mean a “fat marriage”?
  Dromio of Syracuse: Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen wench, and all grease, and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light. I warrant her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter. If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.
  Antipholus of Syracuse: What complexion is she of?
  Dromio of Syracuse: Swart like my shoe, but her face nothing like so clean kept. For why? she sweats, a man may go overshoes in the grime of it.
  Antipholus of Syracuse: That’s a fault that water will mend.
  Dromio of Syracuse: No, sir, ’tis in grain; Noah’s flood could not do it.
  Antipholus of Syracuse: What’s her name?
  Dromio of Syracuse: Nell, sir; but her name and three quarters, that’s an ell and three quarters, will not measure her from hip to hip.
  Antipholus of Syracuse: Then she bears some breadth?
  Dromio of Syracuse: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her.
  • Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, act III, scene 2

• There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man is thy companion.
  • Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, act II, scene 4, Prince Hal to Falstaff

• Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
  • Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Interlude

• Con: You're endangering your health. Pro: I'm drought and famine resistant.
  • The Simpsons, Season 7, Episode 7: "King-Size Homer"

• All my life, I've been an obese man trapped inside a fat man's body.
  • The Simpsons, Season 7, Episode 7: "King-Size Homer"

See also

• Obesity