Gaining Lots of Weight Is TOTES the New "IT" Thing...

I figure this kind of a topic goes in the motivation forum... it sure makes me want to do everything possible to lose my weight. Some back story... I did a blog post on my blog http://www.cravingalife.wordpress.com about the fattest women in the world... these 2 women battling it out to weigh over 1000 pounds. I once weighed 530 pounds, so having been in a super morbidly obese person's shoes, I can have an opinion on this matter. Turns out, that some "proud to be loud and fat" woman found my post and had some words for me... she wrote an epistle, which I found quite insanely interesting... so thought maybe others on MFP would be as enlightened as I was when reading it... NOT!! Here are her words (the first quote was mine from my blog post on the subject):


Shannon
“I can’t see how anyone could ever be truly happy that overweight… but these ladies say that they are. It has to be some mental issue…”

I think you have more to learn about yourself before you can claim to know much about these women. You freely admit that you can’t see how anyone could ever be happy being so fat, and when confronted with the truth of such people you conclude they are mentally ill. You never stopped to question the thoroughness of your own perspective. People can enjoy all kinds of things that you don’t care about, or even hate. You can’t project your own experiences onto that of others.

I’m on a similar quest of weight gain, although not as heavy as those two and not nearly fool enough to blast my name and picture all over the media. But I’m heavy enough that I can attest to their honesty when they say they enjoy life at very high weights. I do too, and I enjoy putting weight on just as fervently as some people enjoy losing it. I’m in a scooter. I need oxygen. I need help getting up. A part of me enjoys the luxury of all the pampering I get, but that doesn’t mean I don’t pay my taxes like everyone else. (I work from home on IT and web development, and I guarantee you I’ve already paid more in taxes than many people contribute in a whole lifetime.) And a part of me misses going bicycling and walking around town, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get a great quality of life in my daily habits like eating, reading, conversations with friends, music, sex, the Internet, movies, and so on. What’s so bad about my life? Is it that I can’t run a marathon? Is it that my partner has to put his hands on me all the time to help me out? How are those bad things?

I don’t exercise. I don’t care to. I enjoy being unfit. It’s a fetish thing. You’re not being asked to empathize with it, but it’s not really any different from the leather or shoes or fur or any of the other kinky stuff people come up with to satisfy themselves. I get sexual fulfillment from getting fatter, and that’s worth a lot to me. If you’ve ever known sexual fulfillment yourself, you understand.

I know I’m not going to live forever. Who will? I’m focused on living well, not on meeting other people’s expectations about what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. I am healthy for the time being. That’s not a claim. That’s a fact as surely as Susanne’s doctor said about her in the article. I am under no delusions about the fact that for very big people like myself, sheer bulk (not fatness per se) causes a strain on the body. I’ve had heart problems that require me to take medication to stay healthy, and gastrointestinal problems associated with moving so much food and waste through my system, which also require medicine for me to stay healthy. With those medicines I am as healthy as the next person and have been able to continue to gain weight rapidly. Maybe you don’t buy that someone who is healthy because of medicine is actually “healthy,” but then we merely have a difference of agreement about word meaning and not the objective reality of the performance of my vital organs.

I can’t make any claims that I’ll stay healthy, but I won’t. Who will? Maybe it’ll happen to me sooner than to someone a few hundred pounds lighter. If that’s how things turn out, leave it to me to deal with it. I am not asking for your concern. Nor is your criticism called for, or accurate, when it comes to the “burden” that fat people allegedly place on everyone else. Never mind that social welfare nets are for helping all people instead of just the ones who will use the fewest resources. And never mind that I buy private insurance and am subsidizing far more dangerous lifestyles than my own without being the least bit upset by it. And never mind that I already mentioned that I pay more than the average taxpayer because I am fortune enough to be on the higher end of the middle class. And never mind that I’m healthy today, with no indication at all of problems, making this whole line of discussion academic.

Instead, I might also remind you of that study out of the Netherlands a few years ago that discovered that obese people cost the health system less, because they live a few years shorter on average. That’s right. Less. Fat people cost less. If it’s really about costing money, we should all be huge. But there’s also a study out just a couple weeks ago elaborating on the fact that fat itself is not a good indicator of who gets sick and who doesn’t. It’s other stuff, like genetics, or a roller coaster of weight gain and weight loss, or diet, or exercise, or the social stigma that fat people have to live with. That explains why a large percentage of obese people don’t have more health problems than their thinner counterparts, and even live longer. Body fat seems to be an aggravating condition for a subset of the population who has existing health problems. For others, it seems to have little effect. Yet fat-bashers treat fat like a godsent allegory of shattered morality. Where’s the sense in that?

Look at what those fat ladies’ candor does for them: You yourself, and other people commenting here, are calling them mentally ill, suicidal, attention-seeking. I’ve heard it all. No self-respect. No self-discipline. Ugly. Stupid. Lazy. Smelly. “Gross.” This is prejudice. Donna Simpson has gotten death threats on blogs and forums around the world (which I know because I’ve kept up with her story). People are totally okay with writing on the Internet their preference that human beings should be murdered for being fat.

This brutal hatred has nothing to do with the two fat women themselves, and everything to do with the people dishing out the bigotry. What makes you do it? “Mental issues”? Hah! I wouldn’t dare presume. Maybe you honestly just never thought about it. Whatever the reason, you can do better. Not only are you depriving yourself of the opportunity to accept the truth, but you are actively persecuting a group of people and you don’t seem to realize it. You can do so much better than that.

I’ll tell you the worst thing for me about being fat: I hate being hated by people who don’t know anything about me but think they know it all. I don’t expect people to support my decision to be fat–real tolerance takes a long time, after all, and the fat acceptance movement is young–but I’d like it very much if folks like yourself and your gallery of commenters would think twice before making the kinds of accusations you’re making.

In good will and all seriousness, I urge you to reconsider your attitude.



LOL... thoughts?