Anecdotal rebuttal: I worked with a woman a few years ago. She was thin and attractive. She spent every single shift obsessing about food. Talking about it, in the breakroom to take some nibble of something, and then to berate herself for her weakness and failing. All freakin’ shift long. Need to talk to SkinnyMinnie? She’s in the break room, obsessing over eating 1/2 a grape. When she was planning her wedding she became almost impossible to talk to. Her food obsession was off the charts.
I’ve never met a fat person who does that. We eat what we want and go on about our lives.
This is an astonishingly inaccurate caricature of overweight people.
I’ve known lots of people who over-eat, and have been an over-eater myself. Stress and emotional factors often play into it, but laziness? I have never known that to be the case. I personally gained the most weight when I was in the midst of an intense Ph.D. program, stressed out and sleeping just a couple hours a night. I over-ate to help myself stay awake and to help cope with the stress. It wasn’t healthy, but laziness had nothing to do with it.
The “hogging and idolizing food” stuff rings very false to me as well, but “avoiding work”? That doesn’t even make sense. Surely you’re aware that many jobs involve sitting at a desk all day. Just how many calories do you think the world’s hardest working software developer can burn? The guy who leaves early every day to go hit the gym has it easier when it comes to staying in shape.
I don’t know why people think fat people don’t take care of themselves.
I know fat people who take very good care of themselves, they dress well, keep their hair styled nice, look after themselves well. The women always have their hair done, makeup on and manicured fingers.
I know thin people who live on junk food, cigarettes and coffee.
I know fat people who work hard and thin people who barely lift a finger. My sister was always thin and my mother said the only exercise she got was getting up off the couch to change the TV channel.
I know a man who weighs 500 pounds, he is always well dressed, shaved, neat hair cut. He’s outgoing, friendly and always doing something. I have an overweight friend who not only works hard at work but she keeps a pristine house and yard as well.
I know lazy thin people. They work harder at getting out of work than if they just did the work.
I’ve been that person – the one who didn’t recognize an old acquaintance. In reverse, though.
A few years ago, I ran into a woman at a part. She greeted me quite happily, by name, and told me how nice it was to see me after all these years.
I didn’t recognize her. After a brief awkward moment, she told me her name. I knew instantly who she was – we’d been sort of friends-of-friends in college. But she’d become obese in the more than fifteen years since I’d seen her. Not just put on a few pounds – she’d become actually obese. She must have weighed well over 200 pounds, and she was only about 5’1". And she wasn’t overweight at all when we were in college.
I felt terrible, but she really looked so different, between the weight gain and the years and a very different hairstyle (and color), that I didn’t recognize her. Intellectually, I knew I had no reason to feel bad, but I did.
Oh my yes. The difference is as enormous as the weight loss. I lost 200 pounds and entered a world of people I practically didn’t even know existed. The greatest is direct eye contact and smiles. Nobody smiles at a fat person. I also started getting promotions almost immediately. One after another with no change in work habits. Sad really.
I know you guys are being funny, but what Floaty said about waiting at the crosswalk really does happen. People who are perceived as “more attractive” for whatever reason (weight, wardrobe, anything you can take in at a glance, really) are also more attention-getting, and traffic has to know you’re there before they can stop for you. It even happens to me, and I haven’t undergone anywhere near as radical a transformation as Floaty has. I live in the Greater Boston Area, where you’re considered an unusually chivalrous driver if you make an effort to miss pedestrians by a whole foot. I’m in considerably less danger of getting run over if I wear a miniskirt. If I walk up to a knot of people all waiting to cross the street, within moments, not only does the passing traffic notice, but someone will stop to wave us all across. The extent of it still surprises me. I mean, I think I look good in that skirt or I wouldn’t have worn it, but I didn’t think the thing was magic.
(Congrats on your success, Floaty! May you have equal fortune in all your other endeavours.)
My reply to the OP and my opinion is crass, I’ll quickly admit to that. However, my suggests are an explanation to why people generally treat overweight people unfairly. In their minds it is fair - to an extent.
To make sure we are all talking about the same thing here - when I say someone is overweight I am talking about having a large percentage of body fat. So a 6’ tall male could be 150 pounds or 200 pounds and still in great shape, it just depends on the build.
A difficult hurdle in the “Fat” perception, to me, is that big boned (large framed) people who stay slim somehow feel guilty and lump themselves with people who are legitimately obese. So a woman that looks gorgeous, with big hips and hardly and stomach fat somehow thinks she is fat.
My point about laziness is that a skinny person will see a fat person, and the burdens a fat person can put on society, and be agitated by it. The phenomenon is large enough where I don’t think it is purely bigoted.
I guess that is my gripe with it - fat people don’t want to be discriminated against, and liken it to racism. To me that is incorrect: while skin color says nothing of the individual I argue that body fat percentage CAN. Not always, of course, but quite often.
I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum and the only difference I’ve noticed has been myself. I’m extremely outgoing, would talk to a fence post and smile at anyone who looks in my direction. However, when I’ve been at my absolute heaviest, I wanted to disappear. I was so miserable, I didn’t want any attention drawn to myself. I hated the clothes I was relegated to wearing, because I couldn’t afford nicer things. I hated how my severe depression fed my weight gain, which in turn fed my depression more. When I just had to be out of the house, I’d still be overcompensatingly polite, but please, everyone, simply ignore me. And I think now that I’m truly more concerned with my health and the confidence that confers, I’m more interested in what goes on around me and all the interactions of everyone I meet or have dealings with. At least, that’s my experience.
I often avoid directing my attention towards significantly overweight people out of consideration. A significant portion of them seem to not want attention directed at them. I say this as someone who was formerly 80#+ heavier (many years ago) and often didn’t want the attention then myself.
As part of the preparation for weight-loss surgery years ago I was required to attend a series of classes, and one dealt with preparing for the reality of how people’s behavior and attitude towards you would change once you lost weight. It dealt with both sides of the coin: the people who are pleased with your change and the move out of invisibility, and the people who reject you for getting thinner. There were as many examples of people being rejected by friends and family as they lost weight as there were tales of improved relationships. A lot of the rejection came from people who either had a vested interest in keeping you fat, or people who didn’t like the change in personality that occurs when you begin to deal with the positive attention you get. One of the moderators told us how friends cut him off because they said he was a happier, nicer, sweeter guy when he was heavy, and now he was, in their view, more aggressive, brasher, more opinionated, meaner…things he looked on as being more confident, more assertive, less timid, etc. His wife wasn’t thrilled because she hadn’t lost weight and now she felt their marriage was threatened because he was looking better and getting positive reactions from women, and he had rediscovered interest in sex that didn’t correspond with her level of interest.
The point was, life changes after making a life-changing change. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. You change…sometimes for the better, sometimes not. It could be your boss found you to be a competent worker but wasn’t interested in you as a person because you were depressed, tired, shy, timid, snarky, whatever. But now maybe you are speaking up more, sharing opinions more, smiling more…whatever, and she can now see a personality that she enjoys interacting with more.
I read on another board about a woman who felt she could stop being “jolly” to compensate. She became much more herself, not a bad person or anything, but just more relaxed and normal. She stopped playing the jolly fatty so people would like her, and allowed herself to be a person who sometimes has a shitty day. Some people, of course, didn’t like it.
How does any of that make it more OK to be rude to people who have weaknesses that you can see than to people whose weaknesses you can’t see?
How is it not bigoted to assume that, because a group of people as a whole has a statistically greater chance of having/causing a given problem, that an individual member of that group will have/cause that problem?
I lost half my body weight and the only thing I really hate is that everyone makes excuses to me constantly for why they haven’t. I’m not judging, I know that it is a very hard head game we all have to play individually, I don’t care if you are fat, please stop making me feel bad for making you feel guilty in your own head.
I have definitely noticed that health professionals are much more helpful and attentive than when I was 40 pounds heavier. Before, they were almost dismissive, now they are almost solicitous.
I wore a suit last Saturday to a funeral. Because it was out and (relatively) clean, I wore it to church on Sunday. Not only did the Rector remark on me in my suit, but others made remarks about my appearance.
Important tangential: I’ve lost 13 pounds in the last 3 weeks, with plenty more where that came from. Perhaps it is a slight thinning of the face coupled with the suit. I NEVER wear suits- including to church. ( God loves me even in my black chinos )
Weird. And as I read this thread, off-putting in a way.
I’m just confused by all this. If the first, and if I take it to mean most important thing, to do to change your life was to lose weight, then it would seem that for you personally losing the weight had a great effect on how you felt about yourself as a person. I congratulate you on the weight loss, but I just think it can be difficult to determine exactly why people treat you different. The weight could be the reason people treat you different, but it could also be that you are more warm and pleasant to be around because you feel better about yourself. From my own perspective I used to be in the restaurant industry. The restaurant industry is considered an image industry, and to a certain extent I found that to be true, but I would describe the situation as a little more complex. The very best waitresses may or may not be particularly attractive, but without fail were had extremely charismatic personalities. There were a lot of attractive waitresses who did not have good personalities and could get by; but without having very good people skills they could only be mediocre, they would not be the ones that made the most money. Someone who was not attractive and lacked charisma would not be part of the front of house staff.
Why off-putting? Guys in suits are hawt! And they look smarter!
I have an acquaintance I see only at work, wearing a suit or a sport coat. Nice looking guy, smart, funny. He came in once on a Saturday in a t shirt and coach shorts. It was like his perceived IQ dropped 40 points! And my SO is a big guy…when he puts on the suit he’s just…yummy!
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