health

Is the only thing making fat people unhappy, the prejudice of everyone else?

 

This is British writer Tanya Gold and she thinks the answer to this question is yes.
This week it emerged in the UK that overweight women are more likely to be fired
from their jobs than other women. They are also more likely to be a
victim of crime and more likely to be bereaved.

Fed up with being
pitied, patronised and blamed, this
self-confessed larger lady, Tanya has written a defiant blast against our obsession with slimness and what she sees as a persecution of fat people.

“For many months now, it has been clear that I’m at war with
society. Or rather, that society is at war with me. Call me paranoid if
you must but everywhere I look, I am denounced, oppressed and scolded.
This week alone, it emerged that I am more likely to be fired from my
job than other women. I am also more likely to be a victim of crime and
more likely to be bereaved.

According to the advertising
industry, I am unattractive; men don’t want me. Or if they do, they
certainly won’t tell their friends about it. Clothing shops don’t cater
for me. In fact, they detest me. In Bond Street, I am literally waved
away from the racks of precious clothes.

 

I will probably be a bad mother, I am
told. I am stared at on the Tube, as if I have two heads. Even those
who pride themselves on their compassion are happy to join in my public
torment.

In the newspaper this week, a columnist called people like
me losers and suspected that we have feelings of ‘worthlessness’ and
wondered if we have suffered ‘traumatic life events’.

And what is
my terrible crime? What have I done to deserve this outpouring of scorn
and opprobrium? Eaten too much, that’s all. I have breached one of the
boundaries of polite society with my giant bottom. Yes, ladies and
gentleman, I am fat.

You want to know how fat? OK, I am a size 16 and I weigh 14 stone. And at the moment, most of that is rage.

I
have written about my yo-yoing weight many times in this newspaper. I
have written fashion pieces and health pieces and reports about diets I
have tried. I have done juice fasts, yoghurt fasts, and a diet where I
had to chew a lot (I chewed so much my jaw muscles bulged out of my
head).

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I have written many jokes
about my weight  –  far too many jokes, I am afraid. They were funny,
yes  –  ‘Some people go out for a Chinese. Last week I ate China!’  –
but when I read back over them, I realise that I wrote them partly as
an apology for myself.

It was as if I was saying: ‘I’m fat,
reader, but will you forgive me if I’m funny? I may not be decorative,
but I’m amusing! Doesn’t that count for something?’ . But
now I have had enough. I have had an epiphany. I
am 34 years old and I am fed up of apologising for myself. I am also
fed up of trying to change.

Obesity may be dangerous to one’s health – but so is skiing. Perhaps I’ll always be fat. Perhaps I have a lifetime of largeness
ahead of me. Perhaps I will waddle a lonely, fat road towards death, as
society expects me to.

But is that my problem? Or is it yours?
Here’s a thought: what if the only barrier between me and my future
happiness is not my tsunami of flesh but your giant prejudice?
” 

 

Read the rest of the article here…

Perhaps she has a point. I heard on the radio last week that in a landmark case in Canada, the supreme court has ruled that obsese people do not have to buy two seats when they fly – something the airlines were trying to make them do. I found myself thinking “hang on, if they take up more than one seat, shouldn’t they have to pay for it? But then I thought  ‘Wait, maybe that’s not fair. Isn’t it persecuting them because of their size? A small person doesn’t have to pay half!”

Is blaming an obese person for being fat the same as telling an anorexic to ‘just eat something’?