My glorious life as a fat person!

The BBQ Pit
181

Wow! Look what I started, in all innocence!

I was home for the last day and a half writhing in pain and taking some nice drugs that didn’t get rid of the pain but made me feel really happy.

Anyway, here I am, back at work today, feeling slightly better and interested to see what’s been going on in this thread.

To clarify: my original post was mainly directed at my husband, who can and does eat anything he wants and doesn’t gain an ounce. However, I don’t think I was going overboard in my depictions of the hurtful things that people have said to me.

In regard to the situation that mr. c4c and I haven’t had sex in almost a year, someone suggested that we were having sex at one time. I wish I could say that was true, but I’m sorry to have to report that at the MOST, our average sexual encounter was once a month. It was ALWAYS me initiating it with his very reluctant cooperation. I know that he has other issues in addition to my weight, but the fact remains that for him my weight is a significant issue. He has told me that he loves me so much that he had hoped it wouldn’t be an issue, but has found that it is.

I’ve been seriously looking into bariatric surgery, and he is vehemently opposed to it. So much so that when I brought it up again on Tuesday evening he threw a huge temper tantrum. I didn’t feel any better about it, especially as I’m experiencing a high pain period of time right now. But we’ve done a lot of talking, and this is where I’m at. He’s agreed to go to the gym with me and work out with me, and not to complain about the meals I cook. I’m an awesome cook, by the way, but he wants to eat high-fat stuff and I’ve been refusing to cook that way anymore.

As long as I’ve got his active participation in this, then I’m willing to listen to his feelings about not having the surgery. But if his support continues, as it has been for the last 10 years, to be lip service only, then I don’t feel under any obligation to listen to him.

The point of this post, by the way, wasn’t a complaint that I’m fat. I know I am, I’m not happy about it, and I have been working to do what I can to get rid of the condition. The point of this post was that I don’t like being the butt of ridicule from my husband or any given stranger who happens to see that I’m fat and feels free to comment on it.

I’d never walk up to someone, whether I know them or not, and make a rude comment based on one of their problems. I just ask to be treated the same way. I realize that’s an unrealistic expectation, which is why I chose this forum to vent off some frustration. I can’t change the world, I can only change myself.

There are so many people who’ve been posting on this topic, and I wish I knew you. You’re intelligent, educated, have something thought-provoking to say. And there are other people who’ve posed that make me so glad I don’t know you. I wonder if you’re really as much of a jerk as you seem, or if you’re just playing one for fun, and laughing as you watch other people’s reactions.

Whatever it is, I know that I’m a cool person and I’m really trying to not let other people’s ignorance affect my perceptions of myself.

182

Well, I’m sure at this point not many are going to believe that this is coming with any sincerity, but I do honestly mean this:

I wish you the best of luck with losing weight and with whatever other issues you are dealing with in your life, and amen to being cool with yourself.

183

Sigh.

The GF was logging in on the home PC, and I didn’t check first.

The above post is mine.

184

C4C you do sound like a cool person.

At the end of the day, only you can say if you’re unhappy with your physical appearance. Certainly, how other people act towards us can affect that, but you choose your response. I understand they do get good results with bariatric surgery. I assume you’ve checked into the alternatives and possible side effects, yes?

I would take exception at your husband’s behavior. Forgive me for saying so, but withholding sex and then complaining when you try to make yourself more attractive to him is controlling behavior. Have you considered a vacation apart? Or counseling? That might be your ace in the hole, next time he starts complaining about you wanting to change yourself.

As for eating and obesity, the key is how fit you are. Can you run a mile? Walk up flights of stairs? Obesity has health and life impact – but the most correlative factor is fitness. The best advice I’ve seen here, and you can check Scylla’s recent post in a thread, or further back, Gobear’s is to eat like a caveman and rotate cardio workouts with strength training.

If you find yourself eating junk food at the chain restaurants, you might want to check out Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. I know I’ve lost the craving for the double-pounder.

You might also want to check out Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Steven Covey. I found it on the street one day, and I can honestly say it changed my life for the better. One of his themes is responsibility for your responses to life’s challenges. “I may not control what happens to me today, but only I control my response to it.” Keep in mind we’re backseat drivers to your life, arguing with our own biases – only you can take responsibility for your actions or inactions. But we can however, wish you the best of luck.

185

<slight hijack>
I’d recently read a study about this. Everyone knows a person or two who can eat quite a bit and stay thin without exercising. Some folks followed them around and discovered that those folks tended to never be totally at rest. They were leg bouncers, fidgeters, gum chewers, etc, etc, etc. They were constantly burning off small amounts of the food they’d eaten. Whether the fidgeting is due to a high metabolism or the high metabolism is due to the fidgeting, I don’t know.

I know this isn’t GD, but I’ll try and track down the cite anyhow.

Absimia

186

It’s interesting how one views the contextual landscape of our various bad habits. I have a slow metabolism + I like to eat + I’m not that enthusiastic about regular exercise. This makes me tend strongly toward gaining weight following my lifestyle druthers unless I am diligent. The very fact of being substantially overweight and mired in the middle of bad lifestyle habits makes it very difficult mentally and physically to get started on (must less sustain) a long term campaign to lose weight.

My body and my appetite conspire against me. I don’t mean this as some throw away phrase. They. conspire. against. me. Really and truly no foolin’. My lizard brain is determined to acquire and defend absurdly high weight level set points and will torment me at every opportunity until it gets what it wants in the way of satiation levels. In the throes of a diet where you are constantly turning these impulses aside you really can get a feel for the dichotomy of the rational mind and the tricks the lizard brain is playing with your metabolism and appetite levels.

In the end, in the overwhelming majority of cases, losing weight does resolve itself down to a calorie equation. It might be unfair (it sure seems that way to me) that I can maintain 250+ lbs on the same amount of calories that a 160-180 lb man with a higher metabolism and the same activity level consumes. The trick is managing to live on a lesser amount of calories and this is incredibly difficult over the long term.

For people that tend to gain weight and want to lose there is a war going on that you have to fight 24/7 day in and day out, and sometimes you just get tired of wrestling with biology. People who don’t have overactive appetites and under active metabolisms have no more clue what I am talking about than I have about the difficulty other people have in quitting smoking or excessive drinking. “Christ, just put the cigarette out and the bottle away” is my gut level, non-polite interior mental voice take on these problems, even though intellectually I know they are just as complex and difficult as losing weight to deal with.

Having said all this I guess I should be a better person, because although I have been in the thick of the need to lose xx lbs crowd all my life beyond the age of 10, I have relatively little sympathy for people who are overweight and complain about others negative reactions to it, with the least amount of sympathy reserved for myself. I feel this way because, to me, being really fat is a hideous, depressing and unhealthy situation. It hurts my feet and my joints when I am especially heavy. I look terrible and have no energy for dancing or outdoor activities. Esthetically and lifestyle wise being truly fat is a disgusting and depressing condition with relatively little upside. I may never obtain my desired, lean “fit” weight of 210-215 for any extended period of time, but I will also never settle for being a fat tub of goo when it is within my power, however inadequate, to fight the internal tendencies and external temptations that conspire to make me weak and fat. It is my decision to eat and not exercise (or do the reverse) and in the end I have to own up to that.

187

In response to the comment about how if you don’t like something change or stop complaining:
That is the simple solution we are granted from our freedom. Most people can choose to gain/lose weight, dye their hair, choose the car they buy and so once those choices are made - society believes the choice was made willingly. Everyone has been picked on, most people are aware that living creatures are not to be yelled at, humiliated, or abused. Anyone who might witness such an event of someone being yelled at because of how they look are more likely to hate the yeller than the yellie, but what can be done about a drive by yelling?
In response to the strained relationship for c4c:
have you seen the movie When a Man Loves a Woman? Can you relate to Meg Ryan once she has outgrown her husband? Maybe you were always more evolved than he?
I believe marriage is a lifetime commitment (and nowadays that would be a big debate) so I would hope that you two can find some love for yourselves and your relationship and grow together.
Another issue:
tulley has by far stated my opinions much better than I can dream, way to be tulley!

188

Symplicity–I haven’t seen that movie, so can’t really comment on it.

I love my husband very much. He came into our marriage with a load of baggage, as did I, and I honestly think that in many ways we’re uniquely able to help each other through them. I really understand a lot of his hang-ups, even though I feel very hurt by some of them. But he came from a home where his father abused his mother & older sisters physically and verbally, and he was so determined that he wasn’t going to behave like his father than he decided at the ripe age of 5 years old that he would never marry. And when we got engaged, he kept doing things to sabotage our relationship–not deliberately–but I just hung in there.

Also, I come from a background of sexual, physical & verbal abuse. And I know that colors my perceptions of what goes on a lot. It’s taken the more than 10 years we’ve been married to be able to handle him going in the kitchen and washing dishes without feeling acutely guilty and running in the kitchen to do it myself!

I believe that marriage is forever, and I’m not willing to walk out on him any more than I’d want him to walk out on me. I’m very hopeful that as we continue to progress, we’ll both be able to leave our bagge behind us and become a happier family. Being infertile on top of all the other issues has put an added strain on things, and I honestly think that may have something to do with his attitudes towards our physical relationship. Before we found out that I have the most severe form of endometriosis that exists, the pressure each month of “maybe it will take this time” was too much for both of us. And once we did find out that with the progression of the disease, there’s no possible way for us to ever conceive except through in-vitro fertilization, we’ve been dealing with that.

And please, don’t anyone suggest adoption-----I love adoption, and would love to be able to adopt, but I’ve been given very clear and direct answers to my prayers as I’ve studied and pursued it, and have been told that it’s not our solution. I’ve got great friends who’ve been able to adopt, and wish I could, but that’s not the answer either.

Sorry to be so verbose, but do want you to know that we really do love each other despite everything.

189

I read a cute quote a while back which I will paraphrase. It is by a man addressing other men who say he has a fetish because he likes big women:

“You are only attracted to women who weigh between 120 and 135 pounds that have blonde hair and blue eyes. I’m attracted to women of any hair and eye color that weigh anywhere from 120 to 500 pounds … and I’M the one with the fetish?”

:slight_smile:

190

symplicity, I’m all about freedom. What I don’t get, though, is the idea that a societal prejudice or stereotype “doesn’t matter” because you can change yourself to avoid it.

The fact is that there are many things out there that people cannot change- their race, for example, or their height. Would you say that someone berating another because they are black or extremely short is a much worse offender than the one berating the fat person? No stereotypes or activies of the kind should be condoned or brushed to the side simply because you see the addressed person as “at fault” or not.

Oh, and WV, we don’t agree on a lot but I’ll certainly back you up on that!! :slight_smile:

191

::gives yosemitebabe a standing ovation::

I’ll second that.

I’m 5’2 and weigh about 265 pounds. About a year and a half ago, I weighed 320.

Course I LOVE to eat. EHehehe…

As for the “you can control how you react” etc etc etc…that’s certainly true, however, if it’s constant, after awhile it can get to you. It’s one thing to ignore the occassional tiff, but when rather bad remarks are commonplace or from people that you love/respect, it gets to you more and your reaction is not so easy to control. Then, of course, some people are more sensitive than others.

And the Eleanor Roosevelt quote is, “No one can make you INFERIOR without your consent”.

192

I have serious doubts about this. From here, we find that a regular Turkey Club from Schlotzky’s has 874 calories. Now if we simply apply the Harris-Benedict equation, the formula for finding basal metabolism for dietary needs, computerized for ease of use, we can crunch some numbers. Referenced earlier is a woman who is 5’7", mid hundreds. We’ll say 150 to make a median number. Put her in her mid-thirties, say 34, at the time when metabolism slows down for women. The basal metabolism, the amount of calories that she takes in just for daily functions and not gaining any weight, is 1463 Kcal. Her daily calorie intake should be 1829 Kcal to maintain her weight.

As I see it, she would need to sneak in plenty of extra food to put on weight. Even the large Turkey Club is 1790 Kcal, which puts her below her caloric requirement.

Let’s look at another example. A 5’3" woman weighing 210 pounds (also referenced in this thread) would need to take in 1686 Kcal if he were to maintain basal metabolism. The 874 Kcal garnered from the consumption of said sandwich would put her well below her basal energy requirements.

Please clarify.

193

I’m with red_dragon on this one.

If I ate just one of these sandwiches a day, you bet your sweet patootie I’d lose some weight. I’d be starving, yes, and eventually I’d end up in the hospital, but I definitely wouldn’t be putting on 2 pounds a week.

194

:rolleyes:

195

Whoa, whoa, whoa…what am I missing? Why can’t you adopt?

196

What’s with the rollyeyes, Lola?

197

If you are infertile and have a desire to have a child, then claim that you love adoption, you’d love to adopt, wish you could adopt, but have been given clear and direct answers to your prayers not to - what the hell does that mean?

Did Miss Cleo advise you against it?

198

Did you missed the “studied and pursued” part of the statement? An answer to prayer can come in the form of an application rejection you know. It’s not always a booming voice from the heavens.

199

No, I didn’t miss that part.

It just didn’t sound like the “answer to the prayer” was in the form of an application rejection.

I guess it’s only speculation on both our parts, anyway, since neither of us are C4C.

200

I said I wouldn’t post to this thread any more, but I was in fact wrong here and I wanted to say so. I would gain weight but not neccessarily anyone else. So let’s clean that up, huh?
A large Turkey Original and a medium soda would do it.

Or replace the Turkey with a Delux Original. No soda, no nothing. One a day and nothing else.