“Is that super size madam?”

After being encouraged to eat our greens, count our calories and watch our waistlines, it seems more than a little hypocritical that those who choose to live unhealthy lifestyles could actually prosper from bigger pension payouts.

But if plans from Legal & General, Britain’s biggest annuity provider, come to fruition, then that’s just what will happen.

It won’t be just shirts bursting at the seams, but wallets too!

On the proviso people with a high Body Mass Index (BMI) will have a shorter life expectancy than those who look after themselves, the good people at Legal & General are putting the finishing touches to a pilot scheme in which a person’s occupation and BMI will be used to determine how long they are expected to live, and calculate the resulting annuity payout.

Annuity policies exchange a pension holder’s savings for an annual income, a guaranteed payout for every year they remain on this planet. With payouts being calculated using the person’s life expectancy, effectively, if you live longer than predicted, you’ll be in the money.

Annuities are one of the few financial products that thrive during a period of financial downturn. Due to falling corporate bond prices, anyone looking to cash in their personal pension this summer will be significantly better off than before the credit crunch kicked in.

Until last year, when the insurance giant started the ball rolling in assessing annuity payout rates more accurately, standard annuity rates were only based on the age and the sex of the pension holder.

Legal & General haven’t been the only one to change their annuity payouts to include lifestyle as a factor however, and from November of this year, Norwich Union will be including clients’ postcodes, marital status and smoking habits as criteria for pricing its annuities. I’m pretty sure Jack Priestly, who has puffed his way through 153,000 cigars and more than 700,000 cigarettes, will be kicking himself that the new annuities assessment criteria didn’t arrive sooner.

I never thought there would come a day when being overweight would actually be a plus, as well as being a plus size. After careful consideration, I’ve decided I will have that very unhealthy chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle for lunch. If the saturated fats don’t kill me now, they’ll definitely kill me later, but in the mean time I’ll enjoy it and hopefully the wad of cash that will come with it.