Our sedentary lifestyles must be reaching crisis point if health experts are reduced to advising us to walk to the telly rather than use the remote control.
They can add that to a list that includes walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift, washing the car yourself instead of driving it through a machine and using your fingers to turn the pages of your newspaper instead of facing it into a light breeze.
It turns out that we've become fat. Desperately, dangerously fat. One in eight Irish people is obese. Every second person is overweight. In other words, half the country cannot see their belts without the aid of a mirror.
Official statistics show that obesity is five times more common now than it was after the second World War. Let's just assume that the chart continues downwards towards the Famine. Certainly, obesity wasn't traditionally part of Ireland's physical make-up.
Mammies were buxom but not blimpish. Children had puppy fat, not panda fat. The only ones to really pile it on back then were the daddies. Life was short, and status was hard won, so it became something of an honour for a man to have a beer belly that could stop an armour-piercing bullet. It was not uncommon to see a stomach peeking out from a pub door on a Sunday afternoon, and only as you passed by would you realise that its owner was standing four feet behind the bar.
Now you'd spot that in the doorway of a creche. Half of everybody is overweight, and every time we stand on the scales, the needle wobbles that bit closer to breaking point.
Obesity, we keep getting told, is an epidemic. That makes it sound like a disease, an affliction that strikes down the skinny and leaves them sofa bound and with a craving for crisp sandwiches until they're too lazy to lift the remote control, even if they could be bothered standing up to look for it. It's as if we go to the doctor, and she says: "Yes, it's definitely a bad case of the obesity that's been going around. As a medical expert, I could tell by the way I put a needle in your veins and rasher fat dribbled out." But aren't these just lazy jokes at the expense of people with genuine medical problems? Hasn't "fatism" been described as the last acceptable prejudice? If this article annoys you, don't just tear it out and throw it in the corner. Get up and walk over to the bin.