"Lost 100lbs & found out what the world thinks of fat ppl"
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This article applies not only to fat - it applies to everything (in a western society) that falls outside of western ideals.
For example, I used to dress like a boy. That was what I liked to wear, not really for any reason other than that i liked it and could do lots in it and didn't really care about clothes much. Probably the only thing more terrifying than a girl who dresses like a boy is a boy who dresses like a girl...
I am by no means 'ugly', but if I throw my hair in a pony tail I with boy's clothes I could probably be considered plain.
A few years ago I met a nice guy - the first guy I have ever REALLY been drawn to and sexually attracted to. I felt this huge primal urge to emphasise everything 'feminine'. I figured that there was nothing unhealthy about this, so I started growing my hair longer, painting my fingernails, wearing skirts, and just generally transferring a lot of my artistic expression into my appearance.
The world changed completely.
Suddenly, I was pretty. Instead of melting into a background with all the things that don't catch people's eye, I started catching everyone's eyes, mostly men's. They were suddenly much nicer to me, and much more rude at the same time... happy to leer and stare openly, shout out car windows.
My friends, many of whom were feminists, started to judge me very poorly and treat me badly. A whole sub-society that I enjoyed became cut off to me.
...
Unfortunately, a large part of the reality behind fat-hate, mostly against women, is some underlying expectation that all women strive at all times to appear as attractive as possible. If you 'let yourself go,' cut your hair, don't wear heels, don't grow or implant boobs, or don't wear skirts, you will be socially punished. If you do all these things you will be rewarded.
As I am not a man I can't even speculate on what the social punishments are for being fat or ugly (or short?)...I cant only speak about what I experienced and what I observed driving it. It's like I was a bad dog who needed to be ignored, and suddenly I was a good dog who deserved lots of attention.
Fat is one among the many aberrations for which you may be punished. It is the one for which you may be punished most cruelly, though.
Others for women include:
- too muscley (too masculine)/not enough muscle tone
- too much makeup/no makeup
- too much hair
- short hair
- pants/shorts (oh if you don't wear a skirt you won't even believe how much reward skirts get)
- shoulders too big/hips too small
- too aggressive
The perversion is not what men find attractive, so much as the fact that it is applied to EVERY social/work interaction and opportunity.
The downside, of course, is that if you manage to find the right balance between all of these things, suddenly the social reward switches around to punishment - you must be a b*tch and a bimbo and deserve to be treated poorly and sexually harassed and leered at because that's all you're good for.
It's a messy world out there.
I'm glad that you posted this! Lots of problems exist in the world, and it is hard not to judge (or be judged). I have a close friend who is significantly older than me and speaks to me often about the invisibility of older folks. I think it might be similar to that of overweight people. I just work on being kind and friendly to everyone that I come across. Everyone has something to contribute to the world; it is up to each of us to look for it.
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It's an attractive quality when a person can take care of their body. It shows that you care about yourself. A woman who I was interested in told me this, and didn't strait deny me, but rather told me to continue working on me. Over the course of a year, I went from 310 down to a little over 200. Good enough to catch her eye and have my first date with her.0
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i could have written parts of this story...everything that she said is true...
i know whats its like to be fat, not just fat but so huge that i couldnt fit into the booths at restaurants...
and now i know what its like to be the smaller, in shape girl that men hold the door open for and often try and start conversations with to find out if im single or married....
i will never forget what its like to fall on my *kitten* walking down the stairs at the bank and have no one help me up, but insteady say that its a good thing i have a huge *kitten* to cushion my fall...
i know for a fact that i now have people in my life that wouldnt have been there before if i was still over 300lbs...but that is also partly my fault cause honestly, its not attractive to be overweight and so out of shape that you sweat and pant just walking down the driveway to check the mail....0 -
Great read, it is disgusting what some people think is ok to say to others. Hopefully one day I will get to a point where I'm not the fat one anymore!0
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I really enjoyed this read. I enjoy it not because I agree with the treatment, but because it is such a brutally honest and real account and it is so sad that this is so true. Sometimes I wish I had never been overweight but I definitely think it has given me an entirely different perspective and sensitivity compared to if I had always been thin. I never want to lose that.0
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This is exactly the inspiration I needed this week.
The post at first was sad and made me angry, and then I realized that where I used to berate myself for getting so overweight before, now I actually see the benefit to living overweight and then going through the hard work of losing it. You become a stronger person, you can see outside of the hurtful bubble of judgement everyone else lives in, and you know how to be compassionate and kind.
I know there is a purpose in the pain each and every one of us overweight people go through. I know that our suffering makes us better people and it's not in vain.
We should look at ourselves as better and stronger than people who've always been skinny because we went through a lot of hardship, we appreciate it, and we have wider understandings of human nature and addiction, suffering, and hard work. Yay us.0 -
great topic!! I found this to be true when I started showing muscles.... so true!! I found that I was treated more respectfully... has its' disadvantages too, though0
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Yep. I'm definitely treated differently now with the weight gone...0
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Great read! Thanks for sharing! :flowerforyou:0
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What a wonderful read and a great reminder to always remember where we came from and the struggle we endured to better ourselves.0
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This was a great article! I think I sit in the middle of this one though. One, is it never ok to be hurtful and mean to someone just because of their appearance, and two, it really isn't ok to be overweight either (and I include myself in that). We should all take resposibilty for ourselves and get healthier. I know I maken bad choices w food and exercise and it's my own fault that I am now closing in on being 30lbs overweight.
When it comes to people on a romantic level, it's human nature to be attracted physically to the person you are interested in, attraction is a big part of it. Everyone has a certain type/look of a person that turns them off weather it be someone who is too thin, too fat, who has a goth style or is a huge nerd or jock. These types of people are a turn off to someone out there, it's not always just about weight. I think that what matters most is how YOU feel. If you like being bigger or thinner, then you go girl! If you are unhappy being overweight, then we all know what to do to change it.
People should never be mean to someone, ever. But people also have a right to have a specific look they are attracted to and we all act differently around people whom we find physically attracted and those we don't, not to say treating them differently should entail being mean to someone! Weight is definitely not the only thing that people find unattractive. Even overweight people have other people out there that they look at and think, 'I'd never be attractied to them or date them'. It's all preference I think.0 -
As a person who was 260 then lost weight and then got back up to 295 I was able to witness in a short period of time the harsh reality of the difference between skinny and fat. It's kind of heart breaking going from being hit on all the time to being made to feel disgusting when someone grimaces at you. Thank you for sharing this article. I really appreciate reading this.0
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I have noticed these things to!!! to the skinny club we go.........blegh0
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As a person who was 260 then lost weight and then got back up to 295 I was able to witness in a short period of time the harsh reality of the difference between skinny and fat. It's kind of heart breaking going from being hit on all the time to being made to feel disgusting when someone grimaces at you. Thank you for sharing this article. I really appreciate reading this.
thats sucks
I notice the extra attention aswell.....and when I bloat back up I feel the shame of being bigger and the ppl being weirder around 0 -
wow. Very thought provoking thanks for sharing.0
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Thanks for posting this article. I weigh 234, was 270. I was sooo excited that I had dropped that weight, but found out it was due to being insulin toxic (I have diabetes) and my body wasn't able to absorb any nutrition from what I was eating. Now that I am on an intense insulin regimen, I have gained 7 pounds. I was VERY disappointed and frustrated. I know that I need to monitor not only my blood glucose, but my carbs, fats and calories as well. HUGE culture shock for a 51 year old woman who always just ate what she wanted, when she wanted. I am paying the price and fully own the responsibility.
The article you posted hit home. I can see the concern and disappointment on my family's faces. They love me, no matter what, but they are worried they will lose me too early. I understand and am concerned that I could die too soon or experience blindness or amputation.
I am just now starting MyFitnessPal. The success stories on here are so inspirational. I hope/pray that I will also be a success story. Anyone who has any helpful hints is welcome to reply. God bless us all!0 -
Wow....Thank you for writing that....it is so true on all levels....Thank You...0
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bump0
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Hello you all. This is an article copied from the link below in which a woman talks about the social stigma of losing 100 lbs. I have read this multiple times. I'm interested in hearing what some of you think about it.
"I come from a small-ish town in Oklahoma where we’ve never met a vegetable we couldn’t fry and the only thing more super-sized than our portions are the huge church complexes that alternate with fast-food restaurants along our roads.
So it maybe isn’t such a big surprise that by the time I graduated from high school, I weighed 260 pounds. My prom dress was a size 24, and my mother had to help me zip it up, a five-minute ordeal during which we grunted and cursed at one another. My aunt had to custom-make my graduation gown, a huge white tent in which I resembled the Stay-Puft marshmallow man. Still, I left for college in New York City feeling relatively confident. After all, I wasn’t just fat. I was also stylish, managing to alter and combine pieces in a way where they overcame their origins as shapeless sacks designed by people with the gall to decorate plus-size garments with ice-cream cones and slices of pizza. And I was hilarious, *****y and sexually brash, defense mechanisms mastered by fat women and gay men everywhere.
I wasn’t immune — hurtful things would happen on occasion. Groups of rowdy teenagers sometimes yelled insults at me from car windows. I gave my phone number to a nice guy, only to find out when he called that he had a fetish for overweight women, shamelessly telling me that he likes “something to grab onto” during sex. Or someone would approach me out of nowhere on the street and tell me not to worry about how I look; someday — when I’m ready — I’ll lose the weight. And of course, I compared myself endlessly to the impossibly thin women in magazines, just like the average-weight women I knew, to whom I also, by the way, compared myself.
Despite these blows to your self-esteem, for the most part nobody close to you really tells you to your face what they think about your weight. As a result, a fat girl’s worldview is missing vital pieces of information. When you don’t get invited on your friends’ man-catching all-girl outings, or when men who enjoy sleeping with you over and over again fail to want to date you, you can’t quite comprehend that all this is really caused by the way you look.
But then, the summer before my junior year of college, something changed. I made a promise to myself to diet just for one summer, and for the first time I saw results. On a low-carb plan, I started melting away, shrinking inwards. I began to grow collarbones and hipbones, sprouting bony, sharp spots all over my body. By the end of the summer, I was 50 pounds lighter, and within a year I was down to 160 pounds on my 5’11″ frame, a solid size 10.
It’s been six years now that I’ve maintained that weight loss, and it is far and away the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. Not because I’m healthier and will probably live longer, but because I now reap the benefits of a society set up to punish fat people for the unforgivable crime of eating too much.
I hear the fat jokes right out loud now, instead of just a whispering breeze brushing past my ear. Men who used to let the door swing shut in my face now hold it open for me politely and look me up and down as I step past. My own boyfriend, a man I began dating a few months after reaching my goal weight, sees the picture on my driver’s license and admits he probably wouldn’t have gone out with me when I looked like that. I appreciate his honesty. It’s better than the good-intentioned people who gush upon seeing the new me, “You’re so pretty now!” before stammeringly adding, “Not that you weren’t, uh, pretty before.”
Finding yourself suddenly thin after a lifetime of being fat is a bit like stepping into that “Saturday Night Live” sketch where Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white guy and discovers that white people act completely differently when there are no black people around. With no outward sign of my former body type, I became a renegade spy for Team F.A.T.
Of course, I didn’t discover that thin people drink cocktails and dance when fat people get off the bus. But when I lost weight, I was rewarded with membership in a club I never knew existed, where the benefits included better treatment, greater professional success and, above all, a new status as qualified participant in the social world including romantic relationships.
Of course, I lost weight to reap these benefits. But it doesn’t stop me from being angry that I had to lose weight to reap these benefits. Of those who are nice to me now, who would have been rude to me before? Which ones made the cruel jokes? Who can be trusted?
As the years pass, it is easy to forget. I have even, on a few occasions, found myself looking at an overweight person with faint disdain, forgetting those years I struggled with the very same issue. I hope never to gain back the weight I lost. But I have seen another side of people that I cannot forget. And with any luck, I never will.
I hope I always stay fat on the inside."
http://www.thefrisky.com/2010-08-09/girl-talk-i-lost-100-pounds-and-found-out-what-the-world-thinks-of-fat/
(there are pictures on the website)
FREAKING GREAT0 -
Glad I read it0
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irony: only to find out when he called that he had a fetish for overweight women, shamelessly telling me that he likes “something to grab onto” during sex.
implying that this man should feel ashamed for his sexual fetishes in an article about disrespectful, judgmental behavior.0 -
I have gained weight, lost weight, saw exactly what you speak of happen, and regained the weight. I notice now that I have gained the weight back, that I feel invisible most times, treated like I have something people don't want to catch. It is worse than before. I can only contribute it to being fat and older now. No longer do I have the youthful, wrinkle-less skin that at least gave me some beauty even when my body wasn't. So hopefully when I finally get the weight off I will be welcomed into "the club". I wonder if there is a sign that says, only young and fit need to apply. It is a sad commentary on our society.0
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Great eye opener. I was fat. I didn't feel handsome. Am still overweight, but doing something about it now. I do not want to forget the feelings and frustrations I faced because of my battle with obesity. Mostly, I want to be able to help others in the foray of the battle.
Better health has many benefits. You choose...
I am m at 50 years. I plan to be healthier than I was at 30 in the next year Omar so, excluding things out of my control. Can't stop arthritis. I can keep moving.
I am Staying fat on the inside0 -
I have gained weight, lost weight, saw exactly what you speak of happen, and regained the weight. I notice now that I have gained the weight back, that I feel invisible most times, treated like I have something people don't want to catch. It is worse than before. I can only contribute it to being fat and older now. No longer do I have the youthful, wrinkle-less skin that at least gave me some beauty even when my body wasn't. So hopefully when I finally get the weight off I will be welcomed into "the club". I wonder if there is a sign that says, only young and fit need to apply. It is a sad commentary on our society.
You are awesome.0 -
well said!0
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I always got a lot of male attention until I hit my late 30's which is when I also started gaining weight...after that I just sort of faded into invisibility. I honestly don't know if it's my weight or my age now that makes people look right through me. I'm very curious to see if getting back down to my "happy weight" will change anything at all.0
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Thank you SO much for writing this!0
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Thankyou for sharing. I really appreciate hearing this. I considered myself mildly overweight for a few years as a teen. Then I got married and started having babies. I haven't had a problem with weight for 7 years since then, due to bad morning sickness and breatfeeding that burns up lots of calories, not to mention that I'm not a very good cook! But ever since I stopped nursing my 3rd child, the weight started to pile up more and more. My 4th one is 6 months old now. A friend told me about this group, which I an very excited about joining. I appreciated hearing your story. You're right that people should respect others, no matter how much they weigh. God loves you and He always has! He would've died for you even if you were the only one who needed someone to die for them! So if others treat you with favoritism because of your weight, know that He never has. a friend, Ashley 0
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WOW!!!0
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This makes me so sad to be me..:ohwell:0
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