If you follow the news, you know that obesity and its attendant maladies are at near epidemic levels in this country. We eat the wrong stuff, we eat way too much of it, and the only exercise a lot of us get is when we waddle to the kitchen for another snack.

Combine a bad diet with an almost total lack of exercise and before you know it, someone’s asking you to audition for a spot in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. If you think you might be carrying around too much weight, there are lots of ways to tell. Looking down and not being able to see your feet is one; looking down and not being able to see the ground is another. A real strong hint is when you ask the phone company for a new number and they issue you your own area code.

But the surest sign that you need to drop some weight is being banned from an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet restaurant in Louisiana.

Who could imagine that, especially in Louisiana? That’s the home of the drive-through daiquiri barn and alligator-on-a-stick, and the only state in which “fried” is considered a legitimate food group.

But that very thing recently happened to two guys in Houma, La. Ricky Labit, a 6-foot-3 disabled offshore worker, and his wife’s cousin, Michael Borrelli, were banned from Manchuria Restaurant because, the owner claims, they ate too much at the all-you-can-eat buffet.

Labit, who weighs in at 265 pounds, says that the restaurant owner overcharged him and Borrelli for their trips through the buffet line, and ended up banning both of them because they were (you should pardon the expression) eating up the profits.

Labit said he’s a regular at Manchuria and eats there as often as three times a week. But on his most recent visit, he said he and Borrelli got a bill for $46.40 – about twice the regular price for two adults.

Thomas Campo, an accountant who spoke for the owner because her English is limited, said the men were charged an extra $10 each on Dec. 21 because they made a habit of dining exclusively on the more expensive seafood dishes, including crab legs and frog legs. And although the news story I read doesn’t say so specifically, I wouldn’t be surprised if these good ol’ boys didn’t skip using a table in favor of just pulling their chairs right up to the buffet line.

Labit said the owner took issue with the pair’s size and also with their eating habits – only not in so many words. "She says, 'Y'all fat, and y'all eat too much,'" Labit said. OK, so the owner might want to work on her tact, but on the other hand, she’s hard to misunderstand.

Borrelli took exception to the owner’s assessment. "I was stunned that somebody would say something like that. I ain't that fat,” he said. “I only weigh 277." And according to US government guidelines, he’s not overweight – not for a man his age who stands 11 feet tall, or for a small asteroid.