by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

José Breton loves ’em chubby. He likes the fleshy folds in a voluptuous woman’s body. He likes to feel the heft of a weighty woman perching on his lap. “Everybody has sexual fantasies. Mine involve round women,” he says. “Society has a politically correct attitude against large women but in fact, thinness neutralizes sexuality.”

And Breton’s passion for fleshy lasses has led the 41-year-old Quebec City dude to fight the diet industry in a one-man campaign that last Thursday led lawmakers to change how doctors are allowed to practice.

Breton says it’s outrageous that Quebec women pay tens of millions a year in an unnecessary quest to shed their beautiful fleshiness. But even worse is the fact that us regular taxpaying idiots are also stuck with a good part of the tab. “A lot of the diet industry’s profits are paid by patients whose consultations are covered by Medicare,” he says. “I’d love to have a business that gets paid directly by the government. Who wouldn’t?”

Breton, who weighs “200 and something pounds,” spends his days updating his tribute to tubbiness at www3.sympatico.ca/rondes. It’s a site that doesn’t hesitate to lay nasty attacks on groups like the Verdun-based AMTO (Association des médecins traitant l’obésité), which he claims mixes medical advice with product pitches.

“I don’t understand why women pay $50 a week to be told to eat two pieces of toast per day,” he says. So far, Breton’s attacks on the anti-blubber industry haven’t landed him in legal trouble. “I’d love them to sue me for defamation. But they haven’t done it yet. One lawyer representing a liposuction doctor threatened legal action, but nothing came of it,” he says.

Breton’s nine years of constant pestering of the Collège des médecins du Québec to clamp down on diet docs has finally made a dent. The updated medical code of ethics now officially forbids doctors from peddling their slimming products under the new Article 76.

“Round women form a majority of our society’s women. After 18, most women put on weight, especially those with children. If men desired them more it would make a lot of people a lot happier,” says Breton, who reports to being formerly married to a tubby.

So do some of these roundish beauties ever write Breton offering use of their fleshy bodies for the purposes of mutual, overarchingly beautiful sexual bliss? “Um… um… no comment,” he replies.

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