"Lost 100lbs & found out what the world thinks of fat ppl"

This is a great read! Thank you for posting! The saddest part of this is that it is, in fact, true.

Prefacing my comments with the point that I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but just that it happens and there is no getting way from it.

People will judge you as soon as they see you. Sometimes the judgements are right, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes when they are wrong, people will change those judgements as they get to know you. Other times they will still believe the original judgements.

This is life.

If you are overweight, then people won't immediately assume you are one of the minority who have illnesses etc, they will assume you don't have self control. They will assume you don't care about yourself and they will assume you don't respect yourself. If you don't respect yourself, why should I?

Again, not saying it's right or wrong, but it's life, and life isn't fair.

When I see a child, I assume they will be immature and when I see a girl I assume she will prefer sunbathing to football. These assumptions may well get proven wrong, but as humans we continue to make them.

Stereotypes exist for a reason. That being there are enough people who fulfil them to popularise them.

The next bit comes under my opinion so feel free to flame me for this, but...

Regarding someone who commented something along the lines that everything is made to remind you that you are fat - turnstiles, aeroplane seats etc. I rebut with the fact that these things are made to fit most people through/in. If you have eaten too much and are now too large to fit, that is not the air lines' faults or the train stations' faults, it is yours alone. They aren't 'built to remind you' - they are built for the majority and you happen to fall outside of it. These places are businesses, they aren't against customers paying so have no interest in restricting them.

(At this point it would be easy to digress into an existential debate about the true nature of responsibility, but let's assume that we, as adults, are responsible for our own actions, irrelevant of what our parents were like or what society says. We all have our own minds and we should exercise our right to use them.)

In my experience, and that of people I know who used to be obese, it is much harder to stay clean and fresh (for obvious reasons such as being warmer due to having a larger coat of 'insulation') and therefore, as I say, this is in my experience, larger people tend to smell slightly, particularly towards the end of the day or when it's warm or in enclosed areas. That coupled with what is most likely a poor diet, producing quite often bad guts and, in turn, bad smelling farts and you can understand why people might prefer not to be in a lift or other enclosed space, like on a plane, where you also have the problem of encroachment of space.

This to me falls under the category of 'placing the blame everywhere but on your own shoulders'. Which seems to me what a growing number of people are doing, as evidenced by the surge of no win no fee, where there's blame there's a claim companies. If there is a situation that causes you an issue, where you are in the minority (i.e. most people don't suffer the same issue), and you are in control of that situation, then perhaps you ought to look at yourself as the starting point for any apportionment of blame.

Regarding the issue of people wanting to date someone after they have lost weight, I don't see the problem. Anyone who says that physical attraction is totally not important to them when looking for a partner is lying, and if they believe it, then they are lying to themselves. It stands to reason that as you lose weight, you become more attractive, and therefore become more appealing to the opposite sex (or the same sex, let's not discriminate).

I get treated the same.

I was a fat black man, I am now a built black man.

I still get pulled over.
I still get looked at with the "eye'.

Wait wat?

Am I the only one looking at this post as some sort of gloat?

It's like she is saying, if you get skinny, you instantly succeed. It doesn't work like that. It takes more than looks.

I think yer pretty spot on there - it's not cos Im thin its the change in my self worth that has come along the way.

One of the things I say I started to loose weight is I didnt want to look like a fat b***ard driving a convertible.

Now that Im not fat and drive a convertible I realised it's not I'm happy not be be fat doing it it's actually I couldn't care less what other people think

I have had the I wouldn't go out with you if you looked like you did then - but back then I wouldn't have had the confidence to go out with them and give the banter that keeps them.

And I might be thin - but some people still hate my arrogance - I have character trates some people probably don't like fat or thin - the funny thing is though people seem more willing to put up with them in a thin person??????

If Im a bit negative towards fat people its not really cos there fat - it's the attitudes they have that make them fat

Its interseting to see how harsh some of the men are in this debate. Maybe some people who were thin & especially with the men who when they were young adolescents they could eat & eat & not gain weight they carried on eating too much got fat, ate less & got thin. Good for them I'm pleased they found it so easy.
There are people of both sexes who were reared by parents who either trained them from birth that if you fell sad, if you are upset - EAT, my father hated the sound of a crying child so shoved a sweet in my mouth every time. He didn't like over excited kids much either, easier to give her an ice cream so she shut up. Other people grew up in homes where the only pleasure they ever felt was to eat.
Contrary to what some people who think it is all so simple think, if you have been trained FROM BIRTH into a certain form of behaviour it is very hard to recognise & even harder to break. Maybe some of those people were brought up in homes where they got no sympathy & no empathy from anyone that is why they are so uncaring & harsh.
Sure we are all able to stop putting stuff in our mouths in theory but the psychology of it is much more complex than that. Surely if it was so simple these guys who now have all the answers would have stopped eating too much the first time they had to rush out to buy new clothes because their waistband or collar wouldn't do up? They wouldn't have left it till they needed a website like this!

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.

This reminds me of a wedding where I was stuck at a table with a lady who had just recently lost 50+ pounds. She just kept mentioning over and over how she looks down on overweight people after she lost the weight, why can't other people do it, etc...and there was this awkward tension like "Is she trying to fat shame me to my face?"; I was/still am 250+ pounds. I just tried to be very polite and act interested and compliment her (since that's what she was fishing for), but I kept wincing to myself. Even after losing all that weight, she still wasn't someone I would want to resemble from her lack of tact, to lack of empathy (especially when she had come from the same place herself!), so I wasn't offended.

Incredible story. I love what I just read.

Bump, Thanks for that!

Brilliant story and so true to so many even those with less weith issues. For me I was about 5 stone over weight and now in only 4 months I have shed nearly 4 stone of that. Feeling so much better in myself than before and loving the thinner more confident me. Good on you for keeping the weght off too one thing I am going to have to watch closely as I have nighmares about putting weght back on.

Thank you for taking the time to write that.