WHY are so many Australians obese? Tony Abbott has a simple answer. "Too much eating. If you are a marathon runner, if you're a farm labourer, if you're a professional footballer, obviously you need to eat a lot but if you're a normal Australian adult who catches the bus or drives to work and is in an office all day long, then a couple of thousand calories a day is all you need. 
"And three or four drinks is 1000 calories, and many people would get almost their daily calorie allowance through alcohol." Not that the PM pretends to be perfect. Part of his exercise -addiction is about his love of food.
"My idea of the perfect breakfast is bacon and eggs. My standard breakfast tends to be one or two boiled eggs.
"I'm one of these people who doesn't eat as well as I should -because I tend to eat little during the day then have a very big dinner at night, often with probably one or two more drinks than is recommended for good health." Skipping meals is a bad technique for weight control, he says."Eventually you run out of -energy and then you compensate for it by overeating and that's no good because too many of us overeat. That's one of the reasons why we've got the obesity crisis, because far too many of us, having engineered exercise out of our lives, we then eat like we're agricultural labourers, or we binge-eat and that's terrible."