Remember when sports people looked like they enjoyed their food?

Byron Vale is TNT Magazine's Sports Editor. Each week he provides the Fanatics with the best antidotes from the sporting world. To read more from Byron pick up TNT Magazine every Monday throughout London or check out tntmagazine.com

It was a sad, sad week for the horizontally challenged. First, chocolate manufacturers announced the end of the king-sized bar and then McDonald's revealed a massive £60 million fall in profits as patrons stayed away or couldn't fit through the doors.

It's enough to turn a dedicated couch potato to a bucket of Ben & Jerry's for some comfort, if only I could be bothered walking from the lounge to the fridge.

When you put on the cricket whites now after three years of Heathrow injections, curry dinners and pints after work, you may be more useful as the sightscreen than a pinch hitter. But don't despair.

Fat is all relative. If you want to look thinner, hang around people who are fatter than you. To really feel good about yourself, try standing in front of the hippo enclosure at the zoo. Failing that, track down Vanessa Feltz and Rik Waller.

Remember when sportspeople looked like they enjoyed their food?

Cricket has a grand tradition of fat men making good, from the portly WG Grace, through to Beefy Botham, Tubby Taylor, Fatcat Greg Ritchie and the keg on legs, David Boon. But in this new era of low-fat, high carb diets and gym workouts, we're seeing less cricket because there's less of our cricketers to see.

We now live in dark times when even the perennial pie-eater Shane Warne - a man who stormed out of his Madame Tussaud dummy launch when it was pointed out his waxwork likeness was a few candles short of a legspinner - is saying 'no' to the temptations of Chiko rolls and cans of Coke.

Other fatties Freddie Flintoff and Darren Lehmann have also shed their flab. So we should hail perhaps the ultimate cricket fatman - Otto Brandes.

Once asked by Glenn McGrath why he was so fat, the Zimbabwean batsman replied: "Cause every time I fuck your wife she gives me a biscuit."

Rugby league produced some of the biggest big men. Big Arty Beetson, Blocker Roach, Fatty Vautin and Adam Ritson were all carrying some additional padding. Not that you would say that to their faces.

In the red corner of boxing's heaviest heavyweights, tipping the scales at 172kg and boasting a fight record of 67-3-4 with 52 knock-outs, the one-time IBA super heavyweight champ and man who beat seven shades of shit out of Johnny Knoxville in the Jackass movie, Eric Esch, aka Butterbean.

And in the blue corner, the losing half of the Rumble in the Jungle, a man who now divides his team between advertising his own cooking grills and a line of clothing for the 'larger man', a man who once topped the scales at 136kg, George Foreman.

Babe Ruth, the Great Bambino, weighed in at 98kg and not much of that was muscle. Still, if you jogged around the four bases as often as he did, it would be hard to get the pulse rate up.

The entire darts community. n Sumo wrestlers are supposed to be fat, fair enough, but the Japan Sumo Association has started fat testing wrestlers. In 1953, the average weight of a sumo wrestler was 144kg and now it's 187kg.

Not long after golfer John Daly gave up the booze in 1998, he attributed his improved ball striking to his extra weight. "It has helped because my right arm hugs this fat belly right here and it never gets out of place now," he said. "When I lose weight, it flies all over the place." Since then, he hasn't won anything of real note. Not that Daly is the only player queueing up for seconds for the clubhouse buffet.

Craig 'the Walrus' Stadler and Hal Sutton always challenge for that last chicken wing.

Earlier this year, Brazil's Ronaldo stormed out of a press conference when an Argentinian journalist handed him a book on dieting. "If I don't score goals, it's because I'm fat," he said.