But as hard as it must be being fat, for many people it must be hard not to be fat. On my bike ride to and from Katoomba last week I'd look every afternoon for a fruit shop and there were not many to be found. In Windsor, for example, I walked the length of a long main street, past at least two ice-cream stores, a lolly shop and greasy spoons but there was no fruit shop. Eventually one of the locals directed me to Coles behind the main street.

And much of the fruit in pretty well every fruit shop and supermarket is unripe, out of season and tasteless. A chocolate bar and/or a packet of chips is much more reliable and much easier to find. And it is generally true, I think, that greasy takeaway is a cheaper family dinner than a healthy home-cooked meal.

Eating healthily requires skills that many may not have, and those skills range from identifying good fruit to assembling and cooking a healthy meal. Required also, I suppose, is a certain knowlege of the various food groups and our need for the mix. Takeaway requires none of this knowledge or awareness. It's easy, quick and cheap. It was much easier for me in Windsor and three or four other towns to buy chocolate bars than bananas, and after riding 90km it wouldn't have mattered if I had. But habits die hard, and bad habits die just as hard hard.

In one of his television series Jamie Oliver showed the shocking extent of the ignorance of healthy eating, in England at least, and other shows have highlighted this ignorance even more dramatically. We are inclined to see obesity as the result of decision or indecision, when it is more likely, I think, to be the result of a lack of knowledge and skills.

Maybe we should have and promote publicly funded classes for healthy eating, healthy cooking and healthy living. Is there a single fat person who wants to be fat?