Liz Webster: Are we becoming fattist?
I recently read an article about a female fitness instructor who weighs 18 stone.
As much as I tell myself (every time I get on the scales actually) that muscle weighs more than fat, there was no disguising the fact she was overweight.
While she claimed to be healthier than a lot of her slimmer friends, she said she had been routinely laughed out of job interviews as soon as people had seen her size.
Looking at her picture I found it hard to imagine paying her to give me fitness advice no matter what her qualifications, which is why I found myself wondering if I am fattist.
If I had questioned her age, gender or race it would be discrimination so why is this different? We're led to assume that obesity is a lack of self-control and comes from laziness and greed.
And while those factors are relevant in some cases, campaigners are now saying that it is society's obsession with being thin that has led to a backlash against those who are overweight.
That increased attacks on the obese come from those who want to attain the perceived physical perfection of being slim, miserably dieting and resenting overweight people for showing them what they fear the most – getting fat.
The same campaigners stormed the office of London mayor Boris Johnson, who consequently announced that prejudice against fat people should be classed as hate crime.
Now I'm not about to start egging obese people in the streets or shouting abuse at someone for eating too many doughnuts but haven't they only got themselves to blame? While the search for eternal youth proves fruitless, weight is something which can be changed.
Perhaps a new law would mean people wouldn't have to take responsibility for what they put into their bodies – 'Don't worry, its not because you ate too much... It's just fattism'.
My usual philosophy is live and let live, I've counted calories for most of my 28 years and I regularly hit the treadmill in the gym, my weight goes up and down but I realise that's my own decision.
But start draining NHS resources and like a 70 stone man in Ipswich get to the stage where its a helicopter to hospital or an XXXL coffin and it becomes a wider (pardon the pun) issue.
Abuse in any form is wrong. If people are happy with their size that's up to them, but we need to remember that unlike birthplace, sexuality or age, we do have a choice over our health and fitness.
6 Comments
by Mark, Stoke Bishop
Friday, November 06 2009, 6:05PM
“This discussion is academic because there aren't any fatties in Bristol. We're a cycling city, right, which means that everyone rides off all those spare calories?
Hold on, time for my meds...
In seriousness, there are 2 issues here. People should take sole responsibility for their appearance and health, yes. But what I think the author is stating is that there should be no discrimination provided, of course, that the person is sufficiently physically fit for whatever they are required to do. I would agree with the sentiment of live and let live. There is too much interference in people's private affairs as there is. First they came for...”
by James, Fishponds
Friday, November 06 2009, 12:53PM
“This shows the high watermark of the victim culture that we've seen grow over the last decade.
No more. Brits are fed up with the attitude that you can have 'rights' without responsibility.
Anyone who accuses me of being 'fattist' will get a Jimmy Car joke back in their face. 'No, YOU'RE fattist'”
by Grahame P, Central Bristol
Thursday, November 05 2009, 10:07PM
“Your article reminds me of something. A friend of mine visited a foreign country recently. He described the inhabitants as being without integrity or a sense of honour or duty. They were, he said, incredibly selfish and vulgar. Everyone, he went on to say, seemed to think they were entitled to respect and would get quite angry if it wasn't forthcoming, no matter how oafish they were. His opinions are, to me, a little bourgeois but his comments resonated when he described how fat people seemed to think they were victims and refused to take responsibility for being tubs of lard, preferring instead to blame everyone and everything in sight for something which their own overindulgence and lethargy had caused. They were, he said, even encouraged to think this way because being judgemental was deemed to be a wrong thing as everyone was entitled to their self-esteem, no matter how little of it they'd earned.
You might have guessed it. He was a Frenchman visiting with me in Bristol. Somewhere, somehow, we've forgotten that being judgemental has social value.”
by The Hedgehog, Horfield
Thursday, November 05 2009, 9:36PM
“Not only that, Alex, but the 20,000 Calories were being brought to him by his "carers".
Presumably "carer" means "killer" in this context...”
by gelly, bristol
Thursday, November 05 2009, 5:25PM
“"Nine roast dinners a day?"
You do have a choice what you put in your mouth and you can choose how much exercise you do.”
by Alex, Redcliffe
Thursday, November 05 2009, 3:43PM
“Good ¿ never a truer word spoken. The problem is we now have all this rubbish about people having 'fat genes'. This has been seized upon by fat people as an excuse "I can't help being fat, it must be my DNA." *WRONG!* The fat gene merely makes you pre-disposed to put on weight i.e. if you eat a lot of food, you are more likely to retain it as fat instead of burning it off. Fat people are fat because they eat too much and don't do enough exercise and should rightly be ashamed of themselves. That is all there is to it. It is not just to do with looking attractive, it is also to do with ensuring you don¿t drop dead before you even hit 50! If you want to lose weight just don't eat so much!
That guy you mention in Ipswich was still getting through 20,000 calories a day even though he weighed 70 stone! Come on, at what point do you get to before you think "you know what, I really ought to go on a diet".”