Free cake! *

Attention fat men of Britain! Remove your snout from the innards of that pie, cleanse your greasy fingers on the feathered whisps of your tawdry beard and listen up. I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but you are no longer fat. That’s right. Your BMI may still be higher than BMI, but according to Joe Bloggs (you remember) you’re not fat any more. Oh no, you simply have a “steak” body-shape.

Realising that for too long, only women have been able to compare their body-shapes to items of food, Joe Bloggs have undertaken literally an hour of research to come up with the concept that men can now be divided into three distinct body-shapes.

So, you’re either a Pizza Slice (eg David Beckham, Gavin Henson), a French Fry (Peter Crouch, Vernon Kay) or a Steak (Chris Moyles, me). Clearly, this latter category has more than a whiff of the crowd-pleasing euphemism to it, as we all know that the food item fat men most closely resemble are cheap sausages, given that they’re both at the point of ripping through their overly-stretched skins and spilling blobs of fat and unidentifiable globs of meat onto the pavement. But frankly, telling your fat customers that doesn’t sell many trousers.

As a self-certified steak/sausage, I’ve been following the Joe Bloggs advice (which basically amounts to wearing big trousers, dark t-shirts and pointing away from yourself and saying “Look! An eagle! Oh, it really is marvellous.”) for a few days now and I’m sad to report that it hasn’t made me much less offensive to the eye. Consequently, for the benefit of any fashion-conscious fat blokes out there I thought I’d round-up my own painfully-learned rules of sartorial elegance for us fat men…

1) Don’t wear any stripes
There’s a much-peddled myth that if you wear vertical stripes it will lengthen your body and you’ll appear thinner but wear horizontal stripes and you’ll look fatter still. We need to attack this lie and attack it hard. If you are fat do not wear any kind of stripes, at all, ever. Do you know what stripes - horizontal or vertical - look like on a fat person? They look like contour lines on a map. If you wear striped clothing then from a distance of fifteen yards people can see that your belly button drops away like a village well and they can read the jut and rise of your man-breasts like a topographical red alert. Do not wear stripes.

2) Wear trousers around your waist
Sure, in the recesses of your subconscious you know you’re fat, but the chances are that you don’t want to admit it. That’s why you’re still buying 36” trousers when you’re clearly a 44” waist. This means that in the battle between sagging gut and too small trousers, your trousers are forced to retreat lower and lower, until eventually it exposes the ominous arse crack of eternity.

I’ve heard some fat men expound the ludicrous argument that anti-arse crack sentiments represent double standards because some women show cleavage and even occasionally make a reasonable career out of it. There are subtle differences between the two though. Perhaps most notably the fact that women don’t shit through their cleavage. In addition to this most women don’t have that sinister anal fuzz wreathing their boobs. Be a crack friend, not a crack fiend and buy bigger trousers, or braces (belts are so early 2008).

3) Don’t go back to black
There’s something in the minds of fat men that convinces them that wearing black is like a shielding device. Let’s get this straight – it’s nonsense. It does not work. Do you know what you look like when you wear black? The night. Why do you think street lamps switch themselves on when you walk down the street? What makes people start yawning? It’s you. You look like the night.

4) Remember: wacky shirts lead to murder
It’s like you’re saying, look at my sagging form - I’ve let go of any physical decency, I’m just going to go the whole hog and abandon any sartorial standards I may have previously upheld. Then in come the Hawaiian shirts and the self-referential slogan t-shirts (”I’m not fat, I’m undertall!”).

The additional hope is that if I wear a Hawaiian shirt then people will think I’m fun and focus on my fun personality rather than the fact that I can’t stop eating. But where does it end? Health standards have gone, then sartorial, are moral standards next? Cleanliness? Trust me, it’s a short step from a wacky shirt with palm trees on it to murder.

5) Don’t go out
It’s probably an extreme piece of fashion advice but the clothing that really makes you look the best is your own four walls and roof. So just stay inside. On the plus side if you stay in it’s near the fridge and it never goes out of fashion.

* Well, how else were we going to get your attention? It worked, didn’t it?