Quick lesson in the athletic vernacular:

Most sports writers are fat, as in living a sedentary lifestyle, shoveling down too many fast food meals and drinking too much beer.

On the flip side, professional football and basketball players are phat, meaning the epitome of cool, stretching body and spirit beyond their accepted limits, exhibiting moves that make the disbelieving rest of us spit out our beer.

Well, that’s what we thought.

Turns out a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that almost every player in the NFL is overweight.

Ridiculous, you say? As if to demonstrate the absurdity of that theory, my antagonistic colleagues at the Associated Press conducted a little research of their own while they waited for Grapefruit League games to begin.

Lo and behold, they used the almighty body-mass index (BMI) charts adored by health care workers and life insurance peddlers to show that nearly half the athletes in the NBA have achieved tub-o’-lard status.

That sound you just heard was the murmur of a million of us turning to our wives and saying, “See, honey? This belly is fashionable!”

Yup, you’re right. It’s all utterly ridiculous, not to mention disturbing.

You see, in the grand scheme of things, Shaquille O’Neal, Rodney Rogers and Warren Sapp shouldn’t have to exhaust two monosyllabic grunts in defending their physical stature.

But that’s where we’ve arrived in America, where ridiculing, stigmatizing and outright harassing overweight people appears to be the final acceptable form of discrimination.

Lord knows petite actresses who chain smoke their way through six months of on-location filming in Australia are healthier than a guy who can drag Yao Ming’s butt up-and-down a basketball court for two hours.

In the interest of more concretely defending the collective girth of professional sports, however, let’s conduct a specific comparison.

I check in at 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, on a good day. Those are approximately the same vital statistics as Terrell Owens, whose all-world hands and mouth should win the Philadelphia Eagles a world championship before he’s finished.

And you guessed it: We’re both considered slightly-to-moderately overweight.

OK, I can live with that assessment. It beats the daylights out of where I’ve been. My adult weight has ranged from 175 to 300 for reasons ranging from odd hours to genetic predisposition to waxing and waning willpower. I’ve endured more wardrobe changes than Oprah. So sue me.

Maybe you already noticed, but T.O. and I aren’t the same physical specimen. Forget that if I broke my ankle the Sunday before Christmas, it’d be mid-March before I recovered enough to walk to the end of my driveway and grab my newspaper.

I’m sure all we’d have to do is tell him he couldn’t, and Owens would summon the strength and endurance to run the Boston Marathon, body slam everyone in World Wrestling Entertainment and withstand two hours of flying elbows and fast breaks at practice with old-school John Chaney’s Temple University basketball team.

And did I mention he’d do it all in the same day?

The BMI crowd can’t fathom the concept of lean muscle mass, that it weighs more than fat, or that it’s a far greater indicator of health and fitness than a three-digit number that’s easily manipulated by eliminating carbohydrates or eating nothing but lettuce and melon for a week.

That’s because most of ’em barely boast enough muscle to push around their slide rules. So take their findings with a whole shaker of salt.

And hey, dump that salt on a handful of French fries, if you feel like it.

Most of us don’t need a doctor or some other granola-and-tofu-eating guru to tell us when we’re fat. We know we’re fat when the button on the pants that fit swimmingly in November is crying for help. We know we’re fat when we’d rather hold it for an hour than climb a flight of stairs to reach the bathroom at a game or the office.

If you’re 6-foot-5 and 275 pounds, work out more religiously than Donald Trump reads The Wall Street Journal and could rip a 400-page book about BMI in half with your bare hands, you aren’t fat.

But you’re dying to have somebody in a white coat say you are, to your face.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].