The Weight.

To paraphrase the Band’s lyrical question:

“Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a . . . banana?”

Weight loss heavyweights, Weight Watchers, on Sunday unveiled a new point system that has changed the way hundreds of thousands of American dieters think about fruits and vegetables.

The new plan, company officials say, is based on scientific findings about how the body processes different foods. The biggest change: All fruits and most vegetables are point-free (or free of PointsPlus, as the new program is called). Processed foods, meanwhile, generally have higher point values, which roughly translates to: should be eaten less.

“If I lived in the Caribbean, maybe I’d be able to make goal,” said Susan J. Slotkis, 64, an interior designer at the Park Avenue South meeting on Wednesday.

I’m fascinated by this.

I mean, I get the projected behavior change that the suits are shooting for. By charging points for ‘healthy’ fruits and vegetables, you’re disincentivizing their consumption. Healthy bodies should consume healthy foods, not discard it in favor of a sugary substitute that happens to have the same amount of artificially established ‘points’.

“You could be holding an apple in one hand, which was two points, and you could be holding a 100-calorie snack pack of Oreos in the other hand, which was also two points,” David Kirchhoff, the president and chief executive of Weight Watchers International, said in a telephone interview.

Now, all of that has been upended. The new system allots points based on a complex formula that considers each item’s mix of protein, fiber, carbohydrates and fat. Making it more confusing, most people are now given more total allowed points — a kind of new math that requires recalculation of what had been ingrained.

I get it.

What I don’t get, I guess, the subtler point of just what the hell was going on in the first place that fruit and vegetables had become such nutritional outlaws. Last week an apple was bad . . . but now I can eat as many as I want? I can gorge myself on apples? I can pack apples into my pockets and sew them into the lining of my overcoat to eat at the movies because they’re suddenly worry-free? Last week an extra ounce of then added weight, but this week . . . not so much?

Alas, the devil is in the details, and the fruit liberation actually comes at the cost of an overall lower total point allowance per week.

Still.

One’s got to wonder about the role Big Fruit played in all this.

No, not really. I just wanted to say “Big Fruit” out loud.

Go ahead, try it.

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