# Overweight

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