mmmmmm. . . cookie dough!
I haven’t had that in a long time!
Damn Falcon, I’m gonna have to stop off and buy some on the way home from work tonight. Thanks!
Ok, New Year’s Resolution #4 - “stick to the diet” is now officially crossed off the list.
Ben & Jerry’s you say? Damn, now I want some too. I suppose I could take my fat ass down to the store, but that would require movement and I’m just waaaay too lazy for that. Maybe I’ll ask one of my chubby brothers to go for me. Or maybe my not-so-skinny sister.
One of the 2% who I have nothing but empathy for.
Didn’t know that a disease can have a side effect - well, now that I think about it, maybe it can, in a sense. But was his condition caused (directly or indirectly) by the disease itself, or the medication? And what was the disease?
Anyway, I will see you all (eventually) in the Pit, when the moderator comes back to work. All I gotta say is - bring it on - because this post is by no means in jest. I am friggin’ serious.
A virus wrecked his thyroid.
Look, I’ll admit I took a pretty cheap shot – I mean, God, using my dad’s illness to bring people down? – but you really were spoiling for a cheap shot. And I think you started this thread knowing that.
Cheerio.
Wonderful, webmastr. You may wish to check out Mark Serlin’s previous posts on this issue to see what you’re in store for.
Damn, if this goes to the Pit, I may get to 4000 quicker than I thought…
No, I don’t think it was necessarily a cheap shot (your dad’s unfortunate illness notwithstanding). I understand your point - and my point is that your dad and people with similiar conditions are not who I am talking about.
My apologies to you and your dad.
And I am friggin’ serious when I say that people like you make me sick to my fucking stomach. So we eat too much. So we’re lazy. So we aren’t exactly health conscious. Big fucking deal! What the hell does that have to do with you? NOTHING! Why? Because it’s not YOU. If you don’t like it, don’t look. So you aren’t fat? Pat you on the back and hope you choke on your fucking lettuce.
webmastr, I’m curious about how you are going to go about judging people? If 98% of fat people are weak-willed, unhealthy, unattractive and unprofessional, how are you going to differentiate between them and the 2% you think come by it honestly? There are several diseases that cause serious weight gain, I have one that affects somewhere between 6 and 10 percent of women. I didn’t ask for it. I take care of myself by eating well and exercising regularly, but I still have to live with the judgements made by ignorant pigs like you every day.
Okay, I’m totally going to regret doing this, but I have to. I couldn’t glean from the OP where webmastr is from, but there is a large contingency of non-North American peoples that are confused, if not disgusted, at the amount of obesity in North America, and in the US in particular. As to my personal standpoint, it doesn’t bother me. People is what people is. I do agree with the comment about U.S. portions, though. I can’t stand to eat that much food, and don’t go out to eat as often as I like in the States because of it. I get tired of people asking me why I’m not eating, or waitstaff asking me if I didn’t like the food. Yes, I liked it, and no, don’t wrap it up for me. I’m just FULL!
I’m not trying to make nice with an obviously insulting OP, but it’s at least an opinion I’ve heard expressed before. With much less vitriol and ignorance, though, thank the gods.
sigh
webmastr, you don’t understand. That’s okay. If you understood, you would probably be obese too, and that’s not a fate I would wish on anyone. What bugs me though is your hostility and rush to judge.
I am fat. Obese, chunky, a couple of notches past plump, gravitationally concentrated, however you want to put it. I have considered myself fat since I was 11 years old. However, if you were to look at those pictures, you’d just see a regular sized kid a couple of years short of puberty. Today, I weigh about 255 pounds and stand just a hair under 5’ 10"
The short answer to why I’m fat is easy: I eat too much and don’t exercise enough.
The long answer is a lot more difficult.
I’m going to ask you, webmastr, to simply listen to (read) me without jumping to conclusion, without making any judgements, without offering well meant advice, and without bristling with hostility.
The deck is stacked against me. I have eating habits that I picked up as a child that are ingrained to be first nature to me. I have a hormonal disorder (polycystic ovarian syndrome) that is made worse by my obesity and makes my obesity worse. I have a history of dieting, losing a few pounds, gaining them back, and gaining a few more. I have had bouts of clinical depression. I have, for years, worked at extremely sedentary jobs.
I could overcome all of these obstacles if it weren’t for one thing: somewhere deep in my psyche, I believe that I don’t deserve to be thin. Webmastr, I am 29 years old. I am only now starting to come to terms with the emotional scars that I bear from years of well-meaning relatives telling me I’d be “so pretty if only you’d lose a few pounds”, the classmates and peers laughing, making jokes and yelling things like “MOO!” and “Oink! Oink!” when I did participate in PE, the boys who were so cruel and callous to me in my teens and early 20s when I risked showing my feelings, and a thousand other tiny, demeaning memories.
What psychologists say is true: if you hear it often enough, you begin to believe it. Somewhere along the line, I began to believe that all I am is a fat, ugly woman who won’t ever be pretty, healthy. So why bother? While intellectually I understand that for my own sake I need to lose weight, while I want desperately to be attractive, to inspire desire, to be able to run like I could when I was a child, all of that is undermined by a conviction I am barely aware of on a concious level.
You see, webmastr, I understand perfectly that losing weight is a simple matter of eating less and exercizing more. What I’d like is for someone to help me sort through my head so I can attempt it without sabotaging myself. I’d like to be able to go to a gym and work out without becoming paranoid about what the others think and say about me. I’d like someone to remind me in a supportive, nonjudgemental manner that I really and truly deserve to be healthy, slender, and in shape.
Whenever I see a post like yours, webmastr, I cringe. You don’t understand. You don’t sympathize. You don’t empathize. You just look, assume, and judge. Everybody, every fat person out there, has a story. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them have some similarity to mine. Your hostility and disgust don’t help; they make things worse.
If you really and truly want to see fewer fat people out there, if you want people to live healthier and look better, then you’ll keep these thoughts to yourself. If you really want all those fat people out there to lose some weight, you’ll hold your censure and offer support. Because, otherwise, you’re really not any different from the boy in 7th grade who called me a fat cow while I ran laps.
My whole point, if you took the time to read the OP in full, is it is invariably the **fat ass **who complains about this and that about being fat, while stuffing their faces. Or complainx about small seats in airplanes/movie theaters etc. Or suex for ‘discrimination’.
I have absolutely no problem with people who are fat and a) acknowledge that they are choosing to be fat and b) don’t bitch and moan about it.
The 2% or so that are obese because of illness etc., quite frankly, I have never heard complain – and they are simply so far and few between, I feel pretty safe in saying that Joe-Blow Six Pack and his Mack Truck friends down at the bar are probably not suffering from some serious disease. Maybe - but I doubt it.
Yes I have friends who are fat; the fact that they are my friends does not stop me from disliking their lifestyle choices, nor does it stop me from mentioning that they probably don’t need that third hamburger, and by the way, we go for a swim at so-and-so’s pool every week, wanna come along? Some do; one guy in particular lost quite a bit of weight and looked downright hunky after six months or so, and thanked us for giving him a kick in the ass (so to speak).
Am I ignorant for disliking gluttony and waste?
I am so sorry that my big, fat, obese, porky self offends you. Forgive me for living in and ruiniing your perfect world. But believe me it is nothing compared to the way your post has offended me.
If you think being fat is fun you are wrong, try having people like you saying nasty things to and about you all the time. Never bothering to get to know the person, only going by looks.
I will have you and the others like you know that as a human being I rock. I am funny, sensitive, compassionate, loving woman. I also have feelings, I feel anger, pain, shame and embarrassment just like anyone else It is your loss that you can’t see past the package to the contents.
At least I can admit what I am, can you admit that you are a biased, judgemental, shallow person ?
Pardon me but I must leave now, I have a side O’ beef and a barrel of pork rinds to consume.
Phouka, I thank you for the straightforward post. My only comment is that if you are able to rationally discuss your condition, you are more capable of doing something about it. In other words: stop blaming the kid in 7th grade who called you a cow. Other people may well have similiar stories, but in the end I still think people are responsible (on balance) for themselves.
Hi Phouka, in case you hadn’t guessed, I was referring to PCO in my post too. You could have been describing my life. Same age, same weight, dealing with the same morons who would consider themselves to be far too educated and moral to use a racist slur, but have no compunction about oinking in my ear if I have the audacity to hang out in a bar or a dance club on a Friday night.
We all deserve better than that. Write me if you want me to help talk you into it.
webmastr, I’m wondering where in my post you read “the reason I’m fat is because in 7th grade, a mean kid oinked at me.”
Yeah, you pretty much missed the whole point of my post. Doesn’t surprise me.
Hey webmasturbater, it is not fat people’s fault that idiotic industrial designers think that we are all a size 2, and make seats accordingly. And if retail stores and clothing designers were smart, they would stock more of their inventory with sizes higher than the misnamed large. The larger sizes sells the fastest. I ought to know. I go to a department store and all of the multiple-x sizes are gone, while the other sizes are still almost fully stocked.
Fat people are certainly not lazier and unhealthier than the chain-smoking thin people, despite what image-conscious corporations say. As long as we can move well, we should have no problems.
Being fat used to be a sign of high status; it certainly means that the person had more food to eat. Fat became a problem only because of pollution; unfortunately, fat retains more toxins, but not as much toxin as you spew out, webmastr. (hah!)
My girlfriend is fat. She doesn’t “stuff her face” (she eats less than I do in general). She doesn’t complain about being fat, although she certainly does complain about assholes who make fun of her (either specifically or generically) for being fat, and about assholes who make problems for her because she is fat. She tried starving herself in high school to keep from being fat. As far as I can tell, her current size is the size her body wants to be, and she is comfortable with that.
As far as “choice”: have you ever tried starving yourself? It’s not fun.
I will admit to having a preference for large women; I’ve long been attracted to people like Camryn Manheim who are not ashamed of their size. I actually think that what I’m attracted to isn’t so much fat women per se but women who are comfortable with their bodies and don’t feel the need to alter them through radical dietary lunacies to look more like some starving refugee from Somalia. I’d rather have a fat, happy girlfriend than a skinny, neurotic one. It’s too bad there are people like you who feel the need to impose your standards of beauty on everyone, and reserve the right to discriminate against those who you find “less than maximally attractive”. Would anorexia and bulemia be as endemic a problem as they are if we didn’t have to cope with attitudes like yours?
You are ignorant for assuming that being fat is a lifestyle choice.
BTW, I’ve been gaining weight lately, something which I am quite happy about. I haven’t weighed myself lately, but I might actually be up to 145 pounds. Is this too porky for you?
Phouka, I don’t think I missed your point. You said
So you would be able to overcome all the other obstacles if it were not for all those (perhaps well-minding) people who called you fat (in those terms or otherwise) when you a child. And as I mentioned before, the fact that you are so rationally able to pin-point the reason why you are fat (something you are barely aware of on a concious level) sort of indicates that you are conciously aware of it. Like the babble fish in HGTTG. You know, where the babble fish is supposed to prove that god doesn’t exist (this type of fish simply could not have evolved naturally, therefore god had to have created it, and since god depends on faith in the unknown/unseen, proof of his existence means he no longer exists).
Not to give any credence to a vitriolic OP, but I think there might be a legitimate question in here somewhere. Namely: why is obesity so much more prevalent in the US than other wealthy, industrialized nations? I find it hard to believe that the good ol’ US of A has a monopoly on mean kids and media notions of thinness.
Thank you, peep. I’m glad someone concisely stated the point I was trying to make. I’d easily talk about conspicuous consumption or whatnot.