Re this article where this significantly overweight woman displayed herself in her underwear in public and discussed the public and online reactions to her initiative.
I’ve been significantly heavy and I’ve been fit. I have never liked being heavy nor did I accept myself as a “happy” overweight person. Since I was young it’s something I’ve struggled with.
I am intimately familiar with what it feels and looks like to carry lots of excess poundage. It’s physically tolerable when you are largely inactive, but it’s a miserable existence when you have to move around. And I was a relatively healthy fat person re not having heart issues or diabetes etc. It was still miserable.
In the past I lost weight on my own, but this time I’ve been working for about a year and a half with a personal trainer and I’m currently about 30-40 lbs from my goal weight. I’ll tall and relatively muscular so I currently don’t look fat at all, but I know what I need to lose. If I compare myself to where I was when I began the difference in my quality of life then and now is extraordinary.
This preamble is to make it clear I’m not coming at this as someone who has led a fit and slender life, I’ve been more fat than not fat in my adult life. Every pound of loss, especially at my age of 55 now has been a struggle. When I see someone advocating self love and self acceptance as a fat person it rankles me because my sincerely belief is that it’s complete bullshit. IMO there is no obese person who does not desperately want to be fit vs being fat. Fat acceptance from people who do not have intractable medical or physiological issues to account for it is simply giving up.
It’s tricky. It is of course unacceptable to be rude or dismissive because someone is fat, or to let your personal judgment about their size creep into job hiring or something like that. But, personal judgment is what it is, and I wouldn’t look down on someone for not wanting to date someone who is fat, or finding obese people sexually unattractive.
However, being overweight is, no matter what, an unhealthy state of physical being. Mike and Molly are jolly and funny, but they never talk about their knee and back problems, or potential Type 2 diabetes. Most people above the age of 30 or so could stand lose a few pounds, but there are body shapes that are truly a sign of pending health problems. The woman in the blog is one of those - holding so much fat in the belly and hips is not a healthy kind of fatness, as it is usually a sign of a lifestyle that means future heart trouble, joint trouble and organ damage. People are just big, like big guys who look like bears, not so much.
So, yeah, personal judgment of people who are clearly overweight and unhealthy doesn’t seem like such a great sin, as long as that judgment is never used in a publicly discriminatory way. Look at the parallels to smokers - beyond public issues with smoke in the air, it’s all the rage to be rude and judgmental about smokers who are ruining their health. I don’t see much difference.
As someone who also has been fat and not fat, I feel for the most part that these women who are trying to embrace fatness have given up. It’s interesting how society has made fat out to be unattractive, and I don’t think they can change that.
As far as is it ok to judge them if they purposefully choose to remain fat, I just don’t know. No one should be treated rudely, but none of us can help what goes on inside our minds. As I looked at this lady’s pictures, I personally thought, how can she see that fat and cellulite as beautiful? But, to each his own.
That being said, I was just lustfully looking at a man last night who is pretty overweight. I fell for him by getting to know his personality and he has a gorgeous face! (imho!)
It’s wrong to judge someone for being overweight. However, when that someone is standing next to you on the bus in her underwear announcing to all and sundry that she is Beautiful!!! things get a bit murky.
Maybe this lady is a lovely person (although reading her article about how she dances down the street writing her art in chalk everywhere makes it harder to believe), but you don’t get to redefine beauty just by having your picture taken.
Yeah, I kind of want to punch this woman a little bit. Have at it with your self-acceptance campaign, lady, and feel free to Facebook the shit out of it, but can you stop being an asshole standing in the middle of the subway in your undies with this little stunt?
It’s hard to figure out, from the outside, how people really feel about being overweight. Was it a conscious choice or did it creep up on them, have they tried to lose weight and failed or do they just not care enough. As a person with a couple of different problems that make it easy to gain and hard to lose, I’m sympathetic to people who try to do the right thing, don’t get good results, and decide to be happy anyway.
On the other hand I do have one acquaintance who is a “proud” fat person, and it sure seems to be a conscious choice on her part. She recently got a mild burn while making fried rice, because it took more oil than the “just a few tablespoons” she usually uses. To make meals for two people. She’s an exasperating person in other ways, so I do plenty of private rolleyes about her.
I’ve seen nurses who were so obese, IDK how they could do their jobs.
By “obese by choice”, there’s also a difference between someone who has accepted that being somewhat overweight is their natural state (ever seen identical twins who were like this? I think there’s a lot of truth to that) and a woman who deliberately became obese so she would be sexually unattractive to her husband or a man who gets really fat to avoid household responsibilities.
In every single one of these discussions people always ignore the most important thing: being fat is simply an indicator of poor health. It is a correlation, NOT a causation. It is perfectly possible to be fat while still being healthy. And not just being healthy “for a fat person” but being even healthier than possibly normal weight people.
So, if a person is fat but eats healthy food and exercises regularly (gets at least 20-30 mins of cardio a few times a week), then more power to them and their happiness, and feeling positive about who they are. Even if they are fat, if they are doing the right thing and eating the right things, they are probably going to be healthy people. Even if they NEVER lose the weight! The working out and eating right should not be seen as pointless or as a failure if they do not lose weight! It’s still doing good even if the calories in roughly equal the calories out, and the person stays fat.
Fat people who have completely given up on even remotely trying to live a healthy life style, eat whatever they want whenever they want, and rarely if ever get up and move around for exercise, rightly deserve to be judged IMHO. But not for being FAT. A skinny person who does this deserves to be judged just as much.
The issue is that people who are fat are typically fat because they have given up and aren’t getting the proper diet or exercise they need to live a healthy life, and that’s why there’s a huge correlation between myriad health issues and being fat. But you shouldn’t just instantly judge someone who is “happy being fat” if they are living a healthy life.
I wish all peope, including fat people, would just shuddup already about what is and isn’t beautiful. Beauty is just another attribute, like intelligence or kindness or humorous. Some folks are funny, some peope aren’t. Some people are smart and some aren’t. And some folks are beautiful and others aren’t. I feel free to judge anyone who thinks they are something I disagree with and announces it to the world with a bullhorn. My assessment: the person is probably highly insecure. People who are truly self-accepting and comfortable in their own skins? They don’t have to tell people what they are.
That said, fatness is not a barrier to beauty. Just like thinness doesn’t equate to beauty. But all bodies aren’t beautiful, just like all minds aren’t intelligent. I’m all about opening minds and broadening one’s preferences. But I don’t like being beaten over the head and told that I’m wrong for not wanting to look at someone’s dimpled behind early in the morning. I have a slender body and I wouldn’t expect the reaction to be any different. My body isn’t beautiful. And this is 100% acceptable and OK. Beauty isn’t everything!
As far as judging fat people goes…nope, not gonna do it. I don’t know how it feels to be fat, so I don’t feel like I have the right to go there. I will only judge a person for what they do, not how they look.
It is absolutely wrong to judge them. What bearing does their weight have on you AT ALL? Other than possibly tax dollars being used for their health care? There are skinny people who use public health care and no one asks if it is “ok to judge them.” Plus, we’ve already established that not all fat people are unhealthy, and those that are might have insurance. I truly don’t understand the rampant hate of fat people. What are they doing wrong, exactly? Existing in your space? Offending you with their disobedience of social norms? It’s just fat. If I want to be fat, it’s my right as an autonomous human being and I don’t really have to care what you think (I guess you could counter that it’s your right to judge me.) I’d suggest reading up some on thin privilege. It’s a prejudice that a lot of people practice.
But I agree that this lady would annoy me. I like her message but dude, I’m just trying to get to work in the morning.
I’m all for fat people loving and accepting themselves. Loving yourself doesn’t preclude losing weight; rather, it provides a motivation to do so: because you love yourself, you want to take good care of yourself.
I don’t have any problem with obese people. I’m obese myself (but not by choice, however the fuck that works), and I certainly don’t accept it or consider it “beautiful” in myself, but I don’t judge other people based on weight. I know how easy it is to get fat and how hard it is to get un-fat.
I do have a problem with people who run around in public in their underwear. It’s called underwear for a reason, folks. Put some clothes on or go naked, but stop wearing only panties on the bus.
It sounds to me, OP, that you are really asking how you should judge yourself. Are you a failure if you can’t lose all the weight you want to (or think you should)? Should other people judge you that way?
I am also in your boat of having been fat more than thin in my adult life (or about equal, but once I started getting fat it was very difficult to go back). I am now overweight again, and finding it very hard to lose at 64.
The thing for me is to be dissatisfied with my body’s current condition, and to continue to try to make it better, without loathing myself for being that way.
There’s a good line from V For Vendetta that I remind myself of sometimes. Near the end when the girl says that she loves him but she’s never even seen his face, he says (paraphrasing):
“There is a face underneath this mask, but I am not that face, any more than I am the muscles and bone underneath.”
So, although it is mine, I am not this pudgy body; I am a person with all the qualities good and bad that I possess, and that pudginess is only quality one among many.
Best of luck to you and your efforts to lose weight. As drewtwo99 said, it’s better to work towards good health, and if some or all the weight comes off, all to the good.
Roddy