Busting at the seams...

Collectively my local Weight Watchers group shed eleven stone this week. That's basically an entire woman. Each time I have a baby I return to weight watching, and lose the equivalent weight of a small child. It becomes a part of my life for a while, before I revert back to guzzling pizza. And this time of year the meeting is packed full of women (there are no men) with waistbands fit to burst, desperate to ditch the flesh.

Carbon counting and calorie counting have a lot in common. Both are last ditch attempts to solve problems brought about by overconsumption. In the case of the calorie counters fat is the evil by-product, destroying self esteem, eliminating sex lives and forcing people to wear baggy grey track suit pants. "A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips," - my favourite catchphrase as I tuck into a large vanilla slice. In my view visible hip flab is the main reason Weight Watchers has so many regular customers. You can see fat. In fact at a slimmers meeting it's hard to see around it if you're sitting at the back. Your friends see and comment on all that extra weight, your bingo wings wave back at you as you stand in the mirror and people avoid sitting next to you on aeroplanes. If you couldn't see fat, you'd stay in with a Chinese takeaway. Who'd bother heading out to a church hall that smelt of urine to hear a lecture on the slimming properties of kelp tablets if their lack of food control wasn't going to show on their thighs? And fat is getting so easy to fight these days now the large corporations have waded in. Every mouthful has a points value, often displayed on the front of the packet.

CO2 on the other hand is the invisible enemy. I can boil the kettle until it explodes; no one will know and few will care. Whereas if my carbon emissions resembled a trouserful of cellulite I'd be down to my local Carbon Watchers meeting like a shot. But it seems I'm not the only one to have had this thought. The guys at www.thinkpurple.info are on a mission to fat bust our carbon count by making carbon 'visible'. Check them out; if word spreads, perhaps next New Year there'll be a mass rush to cut the carbs, without everyone's breath stinking on an Atkins diet.