Labour heavyweight: BBC deploys Ed Balls bulge Mr Balls, who has recently taken to exercise, took the incident in good humour. "He is too busy training for his third marathon to complain," joked an aide. BBC sources said normal practice would have been to use a generic "stock" image from a photo library, but the picture editor used a cropped image of Mr Balls assuming - perhaps to Mr Balls" discredit - it would not be recognisable. In retrospect, we accept it would have been better to use a picture that was completely unrecognisable to the public. However we've had no complaints from Ed Balls' office about the use of the image," a Corporation spokesman said. The study by The Lancet found overweight men who played a weekly game of football lost an average of 11lb each within 12 weeks, and 4 in ten maintained the loss a year later. The tweet, and the accompanying image, was left online.