*What does the word "fat" mean to you?*

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No, I have a problem with you equating fat, badness, and femininity. There are good fat women out there (I work with a morbidly obese woman who is very intelligent but has terrible self-esteem because of her weight, and train in the dojo with another obese woman who despite being fat still shows up and works as hard as she can). There are also men who are extremely fat and douchbags, and men who are extremely fat and nice.

I don't dispute that, and still don't know what your problem is. Argue with someone who cares, because I don't, any more than the lardy, douchgags who badgered and hated me because of my size.

This is a good starting definition, but don't forget that you are describing the 'average' normal; individual people might have a 'normal' weight that is above or below what is statistically normal for their height, and have to take extreme measures of dieting or overeating to achieve 'normality.' For example, the natural weight of most black people is greater for a given height than for white people; the negative metabolic and cardiovascular effects of overweight set in at a higher point in black people, and the negative effects of underweight set in sooner for black people.

If you've ever looked at historical footage from the 50's or 60's, it's startling how *thin* everyone looks, even though there's a wide variety of body types; It would be good for us as a nation to go back to that state on average without demonizing people who fall a little outside the norm.



Again, don't pretend that you can judge the health of someone who is moderately overweight based on their appearance. There are people who are metabolically and cardiovascularly healthy despite being overweight.



that's a whole different ball park. That is the range of morbid obesity (and is outside the norm even for that classification), not overweight. However, can we agree that someone who reaches that weight is by definition experiencing some sort of medical and/or psychological pathology?



If you're bed-ridden and depressed, why should you? In that case, it's almost a form of suicide in the same way that someone who is depressed and addicted to drugs is committing suicide. If they don't enjoy life at all, they reason, why should they avoid the one thing that makes them feel better (even temporarily) even if it's going to kill them?



The basic problem with overweight always boils down to the question of calories in vs. calories out, but it both is and is not that simple. Do you think that millions of people would voluntarily undergo an abdominal surgery, one with some serious risks of side-effects and death, that effectively removes a major organ, if it were easy for them to simply get up and walk more or simply eat less? Another example: a different one of my co-workers had her stomach stapled and went from three hundred-something down to two hundred something. She had tried, in her words, 'everything' to lose weight before that. She gets out and cares for and rides her (large, sturdy) horse every day (and anyone who has ever ridden horses knows that it's not about 'just sitting there' while the horse does all the work), and eats less than I do since her surgery, but she will *never* weigh as little as I do. She has stopped losing weight, still well in the obese range. What the hell else is she supposed to do?



Or they're medical practitioners who see the difficulties faced by fat people every day and are disgusted that they have to face scorn, disinformation, and ridicule in addition to all of their other problems. I'm not saying that people who are obese or morbidly obese should have their problems accepted and ignored any more than I am saying that we should accept and ignore smoking (and people who take up smoking in order to lose weight are a whole 'nother rant that I could go off on...), but just like people who smoke the obese should be understood and supported when they want to change but not harassed about their problem.



That is a temptation. I lost a great deal of weight at one point, and I did notice myself suddenly feeling rather self-righteous about my new-found relative thinness... which I felt was an unequivocally bad thing. Thankfully, I seem to have overcome my smugness and come back down to reality. Statistically, losing large amounts of weight and keeping it off is nearly impossible; the fact that I have Asperger's actually worked in my favor in this, because it allowed me to perseverate about my food and exercise in a way that most normal people cannot. I *still* have to be extremely careful what I eat, wheras my housemate (for instance) who is both shorter and thinner than me, literally eats more than twice as much as I do. I'll have a 6-inch tortilla with an ounce of cheese and 1/4 of a tomato for lunch, and she'll have an entire package of macaroni and cheese. Am I somehow morally superior to her because I eat less, or is she morally superior to me because she's thinner? Neither. We're both working with our own bodies.



Not necessarily. Some people prefer to be, and do very well, in 'beta' positions. I think it would be more accurate to say that no one wants to be an omega.



This would not be an accurate statement if applied to the vast majority of the scope of human life on earth, and is even inaccurate when applied to large portions of the human population today. We evolved (as has every other species on the planet) in scarcity; starvation, not obesity, was the problem for most of our history. When a species experiences a sudden glut of resources, it both packs on the pounds and reproduces quickly in order to be better set up for the time when scarcity returns (sounds familiar, I hope?) For most of our history, moderate overweight was seen as a sign of fitness and access to resources that most of the population lacked.



Good luck to that person, but statistically he or she is likely to fail; diets almost always do, especially 'rigorous' or extreme diets. Losing weight is best accomplished slowly, no more than 2 lbs a week, because with more than that the body feels like it is starving, panics, and overrides the sapient portion of the brain. If your friend fails, as he or she is likely to do, sympathize; rather than disparaging them, however, offer to go for a walk with them once a day.



Due respect, but that is BS. Obesity costs a lot, yes; however, take two obese people of the same weight and health issues, but separated by 20 years, and the one today will be vastly more expensive to treat than the one 20 years ago. Health care costs are skyrocketing because the standard of care has improved due to new (expensive) pharmaceuticals, new (expensive) surgeries, and new (expensive) imaging and laboratory tests. Not to mention the insurance companies that are making billions in profits.



Malpractice issues, including defensive medicine, account for less than 3% of the increase in medical care costs.


The first thing to do is to start treating it like a pathology rather than something people should just 'get over.' Look at what we achieved when we stopped telling depressed people to 'just get over it.' Yes, the medications were initially overused (the pendulum is now starting to swing back), but huge numbers of people's lives were significantly improved when we looked at the pathophysiology of depression rather than being self-righteous about it. To start with, gastric bypass surgery actually *saves* money in the long run. Private insurance companies have recognized this and many of them now pay for it; just recently, however, the Canadian health system limited access to the procedure in part because of the attitude that fat people should just get over it.


I don't have kids, but I have heard that many grade schools have eliminated recess due to time and budget constraints. Talk about the wrong thing to do!



I'll second you on that one. A salad bar option is a nice start (my junior high had one, my high school did not).

Which brings me to the other point that I'd like to make, which is that science have shown that sugar and fat can stimulate addictive reactions in rats and people. Much of our processed food is now literally designed to be addictive through the addition of excess sugar and fat. In addition, our government's agriculture policies promote the oversupply of corn syrup, dairy, and meat, all of which we have far too much of; in many inner-city areas (known as 'food deserts'), processed food is the *only* type of food they have access to. Surely you have heard the statistic that low-income people are vastly more likely to be overweight or obese than high-income people? Their markets are small bodegas that supply packaged food but rarely fresh fruits and vegetables, and what fruits and vegetables they do supply are the things that have been engineered to never bruise or rot and therefore taste like wood.

I think your heart is in the right place, but I'd like to suggest that you do some research into nutrition and also into modern agricultural practices; for the latter, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is a good place to start. For the former, you should be able to find a recent-release textbook, used, for cheap on Amazon or any other online bookseller.

Fat = a substance that the body uses for storing energy, providing protection against falls and infection, and making sure the membranes of the body, especially those in the nervous system, work properly.

Fat also = the condition of having a greater than normal amount of adipose tissue. How you define 'normal' varies, of course, depending on cultural and medical assumptions. I'm disturbed by the fact that as a (British) size 14 - one of quite a few in my class - at school during the 1980s, I was only regarded as being 'fat' by my mother and a few classmates who did ballet, all of whom had their own issues. Today, I regularly come across people - especially men, and especially men under the age of 30 or so - who think any woman bigger than Victoria Beckham is 'fat'. Even allowing for the fact that clothing is a size or so bigger than it used to be, that's a huge change of attitude.

Fat in our society seems to = greedy, lazy, undisciplined, smelly, stupid, undesirable, and unhealthy. None of these is necessarily true of fat people, and all of them are in many cases true of thinner people. Especially, the health risks of being fat are widely distorted, misreported, and plain lied about. For instance, that chestnut about the obese being responsible for rising costs in healthcare: As well as the all the stuff LKL mentioned, the biggest chunk of health expense in all countries is in fact for the elderly in their last few years of life. It's been getting bigger as we all live longer, there's very little that can be done about those costs short of euthanasia, but governments need a scapegoat, and it's easy to target the overweight. (For more information about fat and the politics of healthcare generally, have a read of http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/ - it's quite an eye-opener.) The associations of fat with various diseases are also skewed by a) the proven hatred that medical staff also have for fat people, which means they're often misdiagnosed and/or simply don't ever go to their doctors; and b) the mental effect of the generally crappy way society treats them.

The media is largely useless on any story connected with weight, because the media is funded by advertisers, many of whom have a vested interest in selling weight loss-related products. Even our government think-tank, the National Obesity Forum, is 'partnered' (read funded) by a bunch of slimming clubs and gastric band manufacturers. How likely to be objective is any group with those kind of associations?

The thing is, as some people have noted, it really isn't about health for most people. It's about hating how some people look. They may claim it's about health, but people who are being objective about a health issue don't use emotive language like 'waddle' and 'fatty' and 'shoving food down their gobs' (all of which I often see used on online discussions that are ostensibly about fat people's health) - that's the language of hate, pure and simple. And many of the people making such comments excuse their lack of (verbal) self-control with 'Well it's not like racism or homophobia because fat people can always do something about it'. One, it's not been proven that it's feasible for most fat people to lose a large amount of weight and keep it off permanently (even gastric banding is limited in effectiveness - and did you know that the safety stats of clinics doing it only cover up to 30 days after the op?). Two, why should anyone have to deprive themselves of food just to make other people stop hating on them? People persecuted for their religion, which is also construed as a choice, aren't made to feel obliged to change it - not in civilised countries anyway. Also, let's bear in mind, people used to claim (and some still do) that being gay was a 'choice' and could easily be changed with enough effort. Sound familiar?

Simply: in the phrase 'fat person', the most important word is 'person'. Only when we grasp that simple fact will we ever get our heads round the truth about health and body size.

OK, rant over...

i wish i could have spoken these words. thank you.

ThatRedHairedGrrl - Thank you. I got a little choked up reading that. *happy tear* ^_^

Seriously though, what business is it of anyone else's if I'm fat or not? Unless they are my doctor or my significant other, none. It doesn't mean that I eat a banquet hall every night. In fact, I eat LESS than all the skinny beautiful girls and still get judged just because I don't look like them. I really hate that people assume I can drop 100 pounds in a fortnight or I'm not disciplined enough. If I could, I would have been thin YEARS ago. It's a matter of discipline, yes but also patience. It's not instant and one cannot understand how hard it is to lose weight unless they have done it themselves, just like how they say you can't relate to a smoker trying to quit unless you were/are a smoker yourself. Yeah, mini-rant done now. :/

This sounds to me like a variation of

"I'm not racist. I have black friends."

or

"I don't hate women. I'm married."

And by the way:



This sentence makes me so sad.

I know, overweight people are the only ones who have any real right to a grudge, no matter how much they push their weight around. I get that.

WTF?

No one said anything about other groups not having legitimate claims, just that fat people are not illigitimate themselves.

Do you ever give it a rest with badgering people? Who said overweight people don't have legitimate claims? I didn't. Those are your words. I responded to the sarcasm that was directed at me with a legitimate statement which clearly you do not like. Get over yourself.

Honey, if you post on an open forum you should expect people to respond to you. Even those you don't like.

Your phrase,
"...overweight people are the only ones who have any real right to a grudge.."

is either an indication of an overly open mind that has been converted not only to what was being argued, but beyond it to extremes that were not being argued, or it was a sarcastic straw-man that was meant to indicate that we were claiming that overweight people are the only ones with legitimacy, when such was clearly not the case.

If you want people to stop challenging you, stop making stupid claims.

Sweetheart, you just like to fight and pick people apart and turn what they say into whatever you wish it to be so you can continue badgering to your hearts content. Get over it.

What makes you think it was sarcasm?


It is "legitimate" to YOU, which is different, and probably she doesn't like it, because she finds that "legimitate" statement questionable, heck, it seems indeed questionable.

I understand that you and others may have a gripe with me, because of my statements. I shouldn't have been so blatant with regard to my feelings / experiences around being abused by people with weight issues, including my own family. It's difficult for me to put it in language to begin with. In real life I am unable to say anything or voice my opinions to these people who bullied and insulted me and projected their junk on me just because I'm thinner than they are, and in writing I can tend to be very blunt in the extreme when thoughts / feelings overwhelm. It wasn't meant to offend anyone so I hope you will understand it as such, let it go and move on. I still can't talk about it effectively and it really does piss me off when you and others are so good at talking at such great length about all your nonsense.

(edited to fix quote wraps)

Ok, so I turned what you said into something that it wasn't: how was I wrong? If you were neither overly-open-minded and convinced by what we did not argue, nor being sarcastic, what did you mean?



Hmmm. You seem to think that people who disagree with you are generally overly self-involved. How does it look to you when someone with whom you have a disagreement tells you to 'get over yourself' and just agree with them?



No, being open is fine; stereotyping your negative experiences onto everyone who looks like your abusers is less so.



Honey, if you're being bullied by someone I promise that it's not 'just because you're thinner.' It may be that the fat people who bully you also have issues with their fat, but people don't become bullies because of fatness. They become bullies because of insecurity, lack of opportunities, and often because someone else has bullied them. They also pick targets that they perceive as weaker than them, and I doubt that they see your thinness as a 'weakness,' which means that there's likely some other reason that you're being targeted.



It is entirely possible to be genuinely offensive and ignorant of why.



*snort*
translation:
'let it go, and by the way you're talking on and on about nothing but nonsense."

Here's a hint: when you insult someone, don't be surprised when they respond negatively.

Last edited by LKL on 18 Sep 2010, 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People become bullies because they have a BIG MOUTH, not unlike the one you are demonstrating right now as you continue for whatever reason to harass me at every opportunity. You will only attempt to exploit everything I say for your own gain because that is all you are in it to do. I really do loathe bullies like you who prey this way on the vulnerability of others.