And then they came for the fatties….
You’d have to be living under a rock, or ignoring the news altogether (which might not be a bad thing) to have missed all the hubbub about Kevin Smith being too fat to fly Southwest Airlines. It’s been splashed across every news outlet all week, rehashed, expounded upon, and generally beaten to death as a news story. I’m not going to argue the merits of the case, who’s right and who’s wrong, I’ve been thinking of something more profound than that when pondering this incident. I made a big mistake, I read a few of the comments made on these articles. The vitriol people are spewing towards their overweight brethren is staggering. I heard somewhere that hatred against fat people seems to be the last acceptable form of prejudice; it’s alive and well in internet comment forums. I want to ask all these people who are so disgusted by the obese if they’ve ever struggled with their weight. Have you ever taken thirty seconds to imagine what that would be like? You wouldn’t ridicule people for mental illness, but in many cases, being overweight has emotional, mental, and/or even physical roots.
One commenter on CNN said fat people have “no concept of moderation” which if you’re overweight you know is absolutely ridiculous. I think all these “normal” sized people have a very distorted view of the eating habits of the overweight. We’re not all sitting around buffets shoveling fried chicken into our pie holes. We are people, with feelings, and complex issues that can’t be neatly categorized and treated with some magic pill. Try just a little empathy, see if you can muster just a little understanding. We all struggle with different things in life, for some of us, our major fight may be with food. Step back and remember that guy crowding you in your itty-bitty plane seat is still a person. Imagine the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do, and consider that an overweight person battles similar evils everyday. Ponder why you find a fat person so disgusting, so upsetting, and try, just for a second to think about how you would like to be treated if your situations were reversed. What if a loved one was treated with the disdain you harbor towards the overweight, how would you feel for them?
Good post April. I have been thinking about how to respond to this for a couple of days now. I think that some people always have to be cruel about something, why I am not sure. Why do they think it is their business to comment of other peoples weight?
Sinead: I have no idea why people comment on the weight of others, an innate need to feel superior perhaps? It’s sad, what ever the reason.
Unfortunately, once you’ve gained the weight it requires being able to tolerate long periods of discomfort (hunger) to lose it. Once you reach maturity unless you have a job that requires a lot of energy via physical work, you still feel hungry even when you’re not burning the energy, and if you don’t eat you get cranky and restless. When I’m hungry, not only am I uncomfortable, I am also edgy and intolerant. Maybe the people who make the nasty comments are just hungry? Maybe we ought give them one of April’s wonderful Cherry Almond Cream Scones so they can relax and enjoy life and stop worrying about other peoples weight? An easy and fun solution to a vexing problem.
Mom: I read a book on dieting that said thin people seem to perceive hunger differently than people with weight issues. The author seemed to believe with enough practice you can learn to not be bothered by the discomfort of being hungry, but I start to feel queasy and cranky too, others say it’s downright painful being hungry. I wonder if there are genetic connections to how we “feel” hungry that influence weight.
I have been trying to lose weight lately and even for a fairly normal weight person, it is hard! I have been watching the Biggest Loser and wonder how people can let themselves get so overweight that they cannot do things, like fly, and not do something about it. I’m of the mindset that I can do anything, and if something gets in my way, I’m going to figure out how to get over that. However, back to losing weight, it is hard as heck to change eating patterns that you are accustomed to, and people need to think about that. They also need to look in the mirror. How many people here in American are NOT overweight? Yeah, that’s what I thought. That will shut up a lot of people from dissing on the fatties. I did have a really hard time with hunger at first, and I also get crabby when I’m hungry. I found that after a while, the hunger goes away, believe it or not. When I say a while, for me that was like a month. I don’t get as ravenously hungry between each meal now, and I think it is because I don’t eat as many ‘empty’ calorie foods as I did before- so the food I eat ‘lasts’ me longer. In sum, love yourself, not just for your appearance and stop hating on the fatties. However, you should make lifestyle changes to be more healthier, because you would be surprised about the benefits. For instance, I hardly ever have an upset stomach, which I used to have a lot.
When I was in my teens I was 25 or 30 pounds heavier than I am now. Over a year or so I changed my eating patterns and acquired better moderation skills, and lost that weight.
In my 20s I started learning about food issues and what’s good and bad for us, and more importantly, for me (as each person’s metabolism is certainly different from the next’s). Along with this new-found knowledge (which I was chagrined to realize was never taught to me by parents or schools) I also had to learn better discipline. For example, when I stopped eating a bag of Doritos for dinner and cut back on dairy, I definitely noticed a difference in my weight.
Those things, along with more regular exercise than I practiced as a sedentary 15-year-old, keep me in much better shape today, at 40, than I would be if I’d kept eating the same things — and doing the same things — I’d been doing since adolescence.
I still eat too many cookies though. And my waistline shows it when I do. ; )