Fat? Sort yourself out by chaining your midriff to a console.

Why do you get fat dogs? It's always baffled us. It's not as if they can go down the shops and buy cake or open the fridge and nick all the cheese (unless they're very clever) so surely when one's trusty canine chum stops resembling a lean, friendly wolf and starts resembling an elongated space hopper with four chipolatas poking out the bottom, all the owner needs to do is give it less food. Job done. Next time you see a fat dog, it will mean one of three things: (1) it's got a health condition which makes it fat; (2) it's learned how to use a can opener, or (3) its owner is an idiot.

Can the same logic be applied to children? Britain's in the throes of an obesity crisis, apparently, with every single child now so fat that they can't even see their own arms. That's pretty serious, and we happen subscribe to the Daily Mail's view of why this is the case. First off, it's because people with less money feed their children on raw meat and lard because they don't know any better. Second, videogames are turning our young into couch zombies who like murdering prostitutes. It's alright when there's no Xbox 360 to suck the kids into the sofa - they work off all that fatty food by running around the streets in gangs and stabbing pensioners. But once you invite a games console into your living room, you've got less than six months before your child turns spherical.

We're not sure the dog logic (dogic) works here. The adults in the house may well be official custodians of the foodstuffs, but children are smarter than dogs, plus they have more arms and hands. Six of them, in fact. Stopping a dog from munching its way through the biscuit tin is as simple as putting the biscuit tin on a high shelf, or even just putting it on the floor with a lid on. Children, though, are almost as smart as monkeys, meaning they'll have a face full of Hobnobs before you've even left the room. The little swines.

So here's an alternative: strap them up to a jOG. This device - which is either brilliant or rubbish, we can't tell - affixes itself to a human and a PlayStation 2 or a Wii. Using a pedometer, it works out if the human is walking on the spot and, if they aren't, it cuts out joystick inputs. More articles like this
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The Shed No steps, no in-game movement. It's an idea which somehow manages to be both ingeniously simple and completely stupid, and for that it should be applauded. It doesn't work with all games and you feel like a bit of an idiot walking on the spot in front of your telly, but hey, it might make you less fat. Or your kids. Or your dog.